Debian On An Sd Card

[TitanUranus]

Hello, was just wondering how things are going? I'm not pushing, just curious.

 

[quartercast]

^ this.

Keep up the good work Stuckie!

 

[Stuckie]

I had a weekend off, and work's been a bit mad to do anything, sadly... though I have made a start on 1.1's installer interface now.
I'll be using FLTK as it's really tiny, and does pretty much everything I'll need from it.

I'm going to have the installer able to download prebuilt images (which'll have whatever software I feel like doing at the time ) or a from-scratch kind of setup, which'll guide you through everything, but will download and install everything. This'll potentially take a while, so I'm going to make the installer at least run on Desktop Linux as well. A Windows port may be tricky though.

So yes, the next big iteration has started.. but it's going to take a while.

 

[delete000]

may i make a minor request? would it be possible to include inetutils packages in the basic image? it is possible that some people (me included) only have a wired network available and in this case ifconfig might be needed before someone starts downloading packages

 

[Stuckie]

Yep, I'll try remember to add that in.
I'll be going back to stock Debian anyway, which tends to pull in a lot more bits and pieces than Emdebian Grip did.. so it'll possibly be a part of that. I'll ensure it's explicitly there anyway.

 

[zeldarocks]

I just got everything untarred and running, but now I'm being told:

"[ 11.93347] Warning: Unable to open an initial console."

At this point, it just sits there indefinitely, seemingly not reading the SD card an longer... How do I get it to proceed?

 

[Stuckie]

Where is this coming up? I don't think I've ever encountered that...

 

[zeldarocks]

Where is this coming up? I don't think I've ever encountered that...

This is coming up when booting the Pandora

Here is pertinent portion of the dialog in order:

EXT2-fs warning: mounting unchecked fs, running e2fsck is recommended
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem)
Freeing init memory: 148k
Warning: unable to open an initial console.

 

[delete000]

i can confirm that this comes up during boot, but in my case the OS boots normally.

 

[zeldarocks]

Can this be rectified?

 

[Stuckie]

Unless I can get it doing it myself, I don't know what it is to attempt to try and fix it, I'm afraid.

Only thing I can think of is ensure your U-Boot is up to date, as I know that can cause interesting issues.. I had to have a Fat32 partition with the kernel in it to boot from, before I updated mine, for instance.

 

[pizzulicchio]

is it normal for the ext2 FS on my 16Gb, class 10 Transcend SD card to be corrupted after 5-6 package installations? i'm trying to install openssh-client and openssh_server but I always get an error at some point. i have tried both pandora-squeeze 1.0.5 and 1.0.6 (xopher's version). should i try another SD card or is installing stuff really that bad for the FS? has anyone else tried installing ssh?

I'm having the same problem of you. Even i have a trascend class 10 sdhc of 16 Gb taken from dealextreme...
This card has no problems under windows or with my photo camera (canon eos 550d )...
Non problem with my old sandisk card... but only 8gb class 2.
My next card will be sandisk...

are we sure that sdhc slot of pandora is be able to reach 10 MB/s ? Otherwise i can buy a class 6 card.
Can someone confirm that?

 

[(naw)mcx]

Had the same problem as zeldarocks - ran e2fsck on the card and got this.

 

[Stuckie]

You've tried to fsck the mount point rather than the raw partition, which'll be /dev/mmcblk0p1 for example ( for first partition, left slot ) .. not sure you can fsck mount points, as I've never really done it..
Also, make sure it's unmounted before attempting that... fscking a mounted filesystem is bad.

 

[zeldarocks]

In laymen terms, what do I need to do? Reformat it?

 

[zeldarocks]

A BUNCH of errors in the filesystem were rectified after running e2fsck, but I am still being greeted with "Unable to open an initial console"...

BTW, what did you mean by updating the u-boot? How can I check whether or not I have the latest version?


EDIT: Also, for reference's sake, all I did to get it on the SD was untar the 1.0.5 .tar.bz2 file and attempted to boot from said card in the first slot.

I then fixed the filesystem as per your suggestion, which detected a bunch of errors...

Again, even having done that, I still continue to have problems...

 

[delete000]

did you untar as a superuser and with the appropriate flags to maintain file permissions?

 

[Stuckie]

U-Boot is the bootloader.. effectively running an upgrade PND ( for say, Hotfix5 ) will usually check to see if it's upto date and flash it if not, if I remember correctly. Or you can stick the latest u-boot files and flash kit on a card from the openpandora firmware section and flash that manually.

It sounds more like a dodgy card, or filesystem.
And I really hope that you unmounted your filesystem before running e2fsck on it, as those "bunch of errors" may be more it chewing up the filesystem rather than fixing anything.

Other thing you can try is repartitioning so that you've got a small Fat32 partition on the front of the card, copy the uImage into there, and edit the autoboot.txt to load the uImage from the Fat32 partition and the root from the secondary ext2/3 partition instead.

However, I cannot reproduce this error to try and fix it.. so you'll need to try various things yourself, I'm afraid

I'd make sure you can boot Angstrom from SD as well ( preferably the same one you're using just now ) to try rule out as many factors as possible.

And yes, as delete000 just said ( repeating as I ended up on a new page, ) make sure you've untarred with the correct permissions and as root/sudo, or the file permissions will be all mangled. For example: sudo tar -xvjpf pandora-squeeze-1.0.tar.bz2 -C /my/ext2-formatted/sdcard

 

[(naw)mcx]

Reformatted, reextracted and now I'm installing openoffice!

 

[zeldarocks]

U-Boot is the bootloader.. effectively running an upgrade PND ( for say, Hotfix5 ) will usually check to see if it's upto date and flash it if not, if I remember correctly. Or you can stick the latest u-boot files and flash kit on a card from the openpandora firmware section and flash that manually.

It sounds more like a dodgy card, or filesystem.
And I really hope that you unmounted your filesystem before running e2fsck on it, as those "bunch of errors" may be more it chewing up the filesystem rather than fixing anything.

Other thing you can try is repartitioning so that you've got a small Fat32 partition on the front of the card, copy the uImage into there, and edit the autoboot.txt to load the uImage from the Fat32 partition and the root from the secondary ext2/3 partition instead.

However, I cannot reproduce this error to try and fix it.. so you'll need to try various things yourself, I'm afraid

I'd make sure you can boot Angstrom from SD as well ( preferably the same one you're using just now ) to try rule out as many factors as possible.

And yes, as delete000 just said ( repeating as I ended up on a new page, ) make sure you've untarred with the correct permissions and as root/sudo, or the file permissions will be all mangled. For example: sudo tar -xvjpf pandora-squeeze-1.0.tar.bz2 -C /my/ext2-formatted/sdcard

Can you clarify with regards to the destination: "-C /my/ext2-formatted/sdcard"? I don't quite understand the syntax...