Hi All,
First of all, thanks to Martin for the instructions on getting this going at
<http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/install.html> (as well as the
work behind the instructions, obviously)!
This is just a quick note to say that I ran into a few issues when following
those directions, and includes some workarounds that I found...
Problem number one: when trying to use "screen" from a Mac OSX laptop to drive
the installer, even though it works perfectly well for displaying the U-Boot
stuff, and the initial booting messages, once the installation process gets
into the curses based tty prompting stuff, the characters become unreadable
(looking like old tty graphics characters, for those of you old enough to
remember those). After mucking around with serial line settings and fonts etc.,
I eventually gave up and used a linux box and its screen implementation. That
worked reasonably well, modulo a few messages at USB bus scanning time that
garbaged up the curses display. All in all, the installation (eventually, see
below) succeeded via this workaround.
Problem number two: I first tried to install to an SDHC (8GB) card in the slot.
After appearing to install OK, the reboot from U-Boot failed with a CRC error
(I forget whether it was on uInitrd or uImage.) Suspecting a flakey SD card, I
chose the route of using a USB flash drive, mostly because I don't have another
SDHC flash card reader floating around with which to test things. In running
the installer this second time, it appeared to install OK on the USB flash
drive (partitioned into a single ext3 partition using the built-in partitioner
of the installer). However, U-Boot (suitably changed for the new device,
according to the instructions on Martin's website) also failed with CRC errors.
This time, I simply stuck the USB flash drive into my (i386) Linux box and
examined the situation. The flash drive partition *was not recognized as an
ext2/ext3 filesystem* and fsck.ext3 could not cure it. My simple workaround, I
repartitioned (this time into a small partition for /boot and the rest of the
drive for /) on the i386 Linux box, and also ran mkfs.ext3 from there. Stashing
the uInitrd and uImage files on the first (/boot) partition of the USB flash
drive, I then re-tried the installation a third time. This time it worked, but
I deliberately told the installer not to repartition the drive or to reformat
the filesystems, but to use them as-is from the i386 setup.
I now have a Debian/testing setup on my sheevaplug!
I notice that Sid has kernel 2.6.32.xx already built for the kirkwood. I
actually need a kernel version later than 2.6.30.xx since the driver for my
wireless USB stick (RTL8187 based) now claims to support Master mode. Any hints
on getting the plug to load and boot into that kernel? (I tried the obvious
thing of wget-ing the linux-image deb, and using dpkg to install it, but that
booted into the older 2.6.30.xx kernel.)
Thanks again for the useful instructions!
Cheers,
Frank Horowitz
fr...@horow.net
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