Debian installer for SheevaPlug available now

[tbm]

darkscout: when you say the installer hangs, does it actually hang (i.e. as if the device has locked up) or is there just a delay (e.g. because it's writing data to the USB stick and that takes some time)?

[tbm]

I added a note about "hwclock -w" to the install guide, thanks darkscout.

[darkscout]

darkscout: when you say the installer hangs, does it actually hang (i.e. as if the device has locked up) or is there just a delay (e.g. because it's writing data to the USB stick and that takes some time)?

As far as I can tell it's completely locked up. It doesn't respond to anything over serial. I've even let it go for an hour or more.

I gave up and did the alternative install and I'm happy now.

[jimjack]

Like darkscout I had same problems.

The installer hangs on installing the kernel or setting up user. An also the rtc clock problem.

Then I use the old install method with Denian Lenny and the SheevaPlug runs fine as a motion detection system.
I had a little problem with an Philips ToUCam. The cam runs only with errors without an extra powerd usb hub.
When I use an extra powerd usb hub the camera runs fine.

Edit:
I think the problem with the debian installer depends on an unset hardware clock inside the SheevaPlug. When set the clock once the installer runs without problems. User with "old" SheevaPlug reported succesful installations but useres with "new" SheevaPlugs have tis problems.

[tbm]

jimjack, yes, the installer requires a sane time in the RTC.  We use rdate to set the time but it fails to set the time when it's way off (I filed a bug about this).  And when the date is wrong, verification of the package signature fails...

Regarding the lock up: it would be helpful if you guys could run the installer again and when it hangs send some magic sysrq commands to see what's going on.

[StarFishes]

Hello,

I tried to install Debian today but still the installer couldn't recognize my USB devices. As soon as the kernel boots the USB port turns off.

Is it possible that the installer kernel doesn't work with all devices? Can I try it with another one?

Greets,
StarFishes

[tbm]

StarFishes, I just responded in your other thread.

[tbm]

I tried several installations on the SheevaPlug in the last few days and I never experienced a hang.  The only thing I noticed once was that the serial console didn't get updated (looking like a hang) but when I pressed "enter" the progress bar jumped and I got output again.

If someone who has experienced this hang could start the installer and then use magic sysrq to find out what's going on when it hangs this would be appreciated.

[jimjack]

I think the installer hangs only on brand new devices with the mysterious clock settings.
Once the clock it set right there should be no problems.

Like darkscout I gave up and installed the old debian. The Plug runs now for caturing pictures
from an Great tit nestbox.

[gunnarhx]

Hi,
I finally got my sheeva dev kit. So I figured I give this installation a shot on a 1G SD card.

Everything seemed to work according to the www.cyrius.com description; Updated u-boot to .19, ran tftp for installer (uImage, uInitrd), ran installation from beginning to end, had everything pretty much default (only package added was ssh server).

So now when I boot the SD card, linux comes up but no network is enabled.

Has anyone seen this? Seems a dhcp client is started though.

Thanks,

pluguser@powerplug:~$ /sbin/ifconfig                                                                                                   
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:50:43:01:6e:5f                                                                               
          inet6 addr: fe80::250:43ff:fe01:6e5f/64 Scope:Link                                                                           
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1                                                                           
          RX packets:25 errors:25 dropped:25 overruns:0 frame:0                                                                       
          TX packets:11 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0                                                                       
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000                                                                                                 
          RX bytes:6380 (6.2 KiB)  TX bytes:2178 (2.1 KiB)                                                                             
          Interrupt:11                                                                                                                 
                                                                                                                                       
lo        Link encap:Local Loopback                                                                                                   
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0                                                                                         
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host                                                                                               
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1                                                                                     
          RX packets:8 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0                                                                           
          TX packets:8 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0                                                                         
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0                                                                                                   
          RX bytes:560 (560.0 B)  TX bytes:560 (560.0 B)                                                                               
                                                                               
pluguser@powerplug:~$ ps -ef | grep dhcp                                                                                               
root      1197     1  0 18:23 ?        00:00:00 dhclient3 -pf /var/run/dhclient.eth0.pid -lf /var/lib/dhcp3/dhclient.eth0.leases eth0 
pluguser  1232  1179  0 18:24 ttyS0    00:00:00 grep dhcp                                                                             

[gunnarhx]

Sorry guys, false alamr; dhcp works fine

The problem was (why is another question) that I connected the plug to a hub. Somehow the installer liked it but not the debian squeeze.
Since I had a netgear switch as well, I tried it and now it comes up in full duplex 100Mbit (with hub it was half-duplex) and I get a inet4 address assigned as expected.

[MarkF]

Looking around the plug community and the Internet, in general, there is a lot of good information out there on how to modify Linux settings to allow for a better and/or longer lasting experience when using solid state media (SSDs, SDHCs, Flash keys, internal NAND).  Would it be possible to alter the installer to choose "better" partition (128k alignment), mount (noatime or relatime) and "swapiness" values when installing on one of these types of media?

I realize this process is supposed to be foolproof and you may not want to ask the user a lot of technical questions; but, might it be possible to determine if the target media is flash based and alter the values above?

[pingtoo]

Looking around the plug community and the Internet, in general, there is a lot of good information out there on how to modify Linux settings to allow for a better and/or longer lasting experience when using solid state media (SSDs, SDHCs, Flash keys, internal NAND).  Would it be possible to alter the installer to choose "better" partition (128k alignment), mount (noatime or relatime) and "swapiness" values when installing on one of these types of media?

I realize this process is supposed to be foolproof and you may not want to ask the user a lot of technical questions; but, might it be possible to determine if the target media is flash based and alter the values above?

I think essentially you are asking to build a sheeva plug distribution, Am I assume correctly? If I am correctly do you mind share your idea for those best practice value/procedure you know so far? I am in process developing a destro specific for sheeva plug would be happen to put in these best practice right into the system at beginning. My destro will be gentoo based but may be I can figure out a way to automate the process for other destro.

Regards,

ccp.

[mgillespie]

I'm also thinking this for my alternatibe Debian build scripts.  It would be trivial to implement settings that are tweaked to suit the media it's being installed to.

The hard part (and something that's beyond my capability) is finding out those tweaks...

[MarkF]

ccp - First, please don't get me wrong, I appreciate all the hard work everyone puts in to make these free things work as well as they do.  I reap rewards from this work every day and am very grateful.  I'm just suggesting possible improvements that would make it "better" for some number of users.  Having an installer or distribution or whatever that understands the currently defined "best practices" for Linux on flash-based media and either followed them, by default, or allowed the user the option of using them would, I think, be a real plus.

Second, I'm not sure what I'm asking for. I use the installer mentioned in this thread to load my plugs to a default state.  I use flash-based media for the boot/root/apps/data on these devices.  After doing an install, I would rather not have to remember to edit this and that file to make sure my flash-based media won't wear out too fast.  Also, since aligning the "disk" partitions to 128K (usual flash erase size) boundaries seems to have a very positive effect on the speed of writing to flash-based media, I'd rather not have to remember how to do the math (C/H/S?  MBs?) to make sure the partitions and partition table line up OK.



Finally, here are some links I have found while searching for this information.  This is not a complete list and there are threads and how-to:s scattered all over the web and this site.  I'll try to edit this post when I see more (if I remember to).

http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/linux-on-flash.html
http://www.lesswatts.org/tips/disks.php

stolen from:
http://www.plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/Reduce_Flash_Writes

http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/02/20/aligning-filesystems-to-an-ssds-erase-block-size/
http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=140.0

EDIT: I need to learn to spel.