Cookie Monster should host Saturday Night Live! He’d be more interesting than Justin Bieber and has spent less time in rehab than Lohan. It’s a win win no matter how you look at it.
It’s a wonder what you can get done once the board actually boots up to a shell prompt. Tonight I completed setup of inittab and boot scripts – along with customization of the rootfs build – to force writes normally bound for the rootfs to end up on a tmpfs […]
BeagleBox: tmpfs for writes, for now, but new u-boot ...
I finally got a rootfs working with the kernel tonight. It’s a minimal rootfs built with buildroot and busybox but it boots up to a shell prompt and does just enough work to make sure ps displays the process list. Whoopeeeee!!! Now, don’t get crazy here. This is just booting […]
BeagleBox Milestone: the board boots with BeagleBox software!
I upgraded to Fedora 14 at work yesterday. For the most part the typical processes I’ve written about before worked fine. But two places exposed some caveats. First, network based installation using NFS doesn’t work. What happens is that after the bootloader info is taken some attempt to access the […]
Fedora 14 mini review
2 I use ssmtp for my MTA (mail transfer agent) under Fedora. Up till now I’ve always just moved /usr/sbin/sendmail out of the way and symlinked it to where I have ssmtp installed. Today, after upgrading a work machine to F14, I finally bit the bullet and figured out how to […]
ssmtp: making it the alternative to sendmail under Fedora
This weekend I buckled down and merged the BeagleBoard validation images kernel configuration into my BeagleBox kernel configuration. When I booted the resulting kernel with the validation images ramdisk image it worked. Unfortunately, because there were a fair number of changes to merge in it isn’t clear exactly which ones […]
BeagleBox: kernel boots initrd, initramfs still doesn’t work
I couldn’t figure out why my initrd or rootfs wouldn’t work and had exhausted all obvious solutions. Jumping to Occam’s Razor, I decided the problem may be with the cross compiler toolchain. So I grabbed Free Electron’s (FE) embedded Linux training lab (which focuses on the BeagleBoard) and decided to […]
BeagleBox: small steps – better xcc, u-boot/kernel boot but ...
With a better understanding of what’s happening with the Beagle Board validation images I’ve started to redesign the boot process for BeagleBox. First, the SD card will be partitioned with two partitions. The first is the FAT32 partition to hold the kernel image, boot scripts and an initial ramdisk (initrd). […]
BeagleBox: understanding the boot process requirements
I fiddled with the u-boot env variables tonight to try and resolve the S-Video problem. One trick from the BeagleBoard mailing list said to set omapfb.mode=tv:ntsc and omapdss.def_disp=tv. I tried this but found that if I tried to run the boot manually to pick up these changes to the bootargs […]
BeagleBox: which u-boot am I fiddling with?
All the parts arrived by last Tuesday and I was able to boot the board using the validation images. I explored the u-boot environment and dug around the root file system to see what the BeagleBoard folks had put together. I booted the board using the serial console and connected […]
BeagleBox: reality sets in – boot issues
Most of the ordered parts have arrive, including the BeagleBoard. Man, is that a tiny board for so much capability! I can’t wait to bring it up. Still waiting on the USB hub and 1G SD card. I had to move a 25-in-1 USB-based card reader from my main development […]
BeagleBox: parts arriving
Taking a break from nerdom for a moment… I just posted pics from my garden this year. Despite warm temperatures not arriving till June, the garden flourished with a hot, dry ending that went all the way up to this week (second week of October). So the coleus and veggies […]