Pogoplug 4 assistance

Hello all,

First I appreciate the wealth of knowledge in this forum but am having trouble with setting up my Pogoplug 4. I can get arch linux installed just fine but I would prefer to use Debian as I already have a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian and am somewhat comfortable with the CLI and would still like to use a GUI with the Pogoplug.

My problem:

I don't know where to start... I have tried looking through some of the guides and a lot of it is Greek to me and I'm not sure what the best solution is or how I should go about trying to install Debian.

Any suggestions?

You can try my tutorial here - http://blog.qnology.com/2014/07/hacking-pogoplug-v4-series-4-and-mobile.html

It's designed for a new Pogoplug, but it should provide you will enough details to switch from Arch to Debian.

1) Upgrade uBoot
2) Setup new USB drive with Debian rootfs

Okay, great tutorial and I don't believe there are any errors, however when I restarted the Pogoplug I get a green light and that's it.

It flashes green when restarting, then amber, then solid green. Any ideas? Did I brick it?

Also when blinking green I get network connectivity on the IP address it is assigned, however, once the LED turns amber and then solid green it doesn't return any ping requests.

No you didn't brick it.

Does your old USB drive with Arch work?

I'm using the same USB drive that I used with Arch. I can access it no problem on my Pi if I need to make changes though. Already tried to set a static IP address just in case it wasn't pulling DHCP when debian started.

Ok so Arch is working on another thumb drive, guess that means I did something incorrectly on the debian install. Great walkthrough by the way, it's definitely a lot easier to understand since most of it's in one place.

Mike Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm using the same USB drive that I used with
> Arch. I can access it no problem on my Pi if I
> need to make changes though. Already tried to set
> a static IP address just in case it wasn't pulling
> DHCP when debian started.

Do you have serial console or did you set up netconsole?

-bodhi
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I don't have the console made just yet and I don't think I set netconsole up correctly. I did get Arch to work on the pogo so uboot is working as intended. I'm going back through now with the directions that grayman posted, would I be able to configure netconsole again this time?

Well reinstalling on a different USB did the trick. It may have been a fat finger the first time around or maybe that particular thumb drive doesn't work with the pogo. Either way I got what I needed, thanks a lot guys!

Qui, Bodhi and all:
Thanks to Qui's excellent tutorial. I converted one of my Pogo Mobile from original firmware to Debian. Everything when smoothly. It also solved one problem I had using the previous installation. It was just very straight forward. Again, thanks for sharing your good work.
I then tried to covert my another one, which already running Debian, using the new procedure. I just did from the debian environment. Everything went smoothly also. However, when I did a reboot, Debian does not run. It looked the serial output, it says the SD card file system format is not valid. I tried both the SD card that was working in the newly converted PM and the one used to work in the old PM (modified based on Bodhi's method described in a previous thread), both gave me the same results. I have serial access so I and do anything availble there. The uboot-firmware should be the same as Qui described in his tutorial. I can change the enviornment variables as needed. As I understand, once everything is done as in Qui's tutorial, I don't need Pogo's original firmware anymore. If it is the case, all I need to do is to set the correct enviornment variables to make the SD card with Debian work, right? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

twinclouds,

Quote

all I need to do is to set the correct enviornment variables to make the SD card with Debian work, right?

Yes! and common now twinclouds, Qui's tutorial is for noobs :) you should install it like you did before when you installed davygravy's u-boot for Pogo Mobile. Follow the instruction here: http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?3,12381

-bodhi
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Hi, Bodhi:
Thanks. The reason I tried Qui's approach is because I have the problem in the previous installation that if I unplug RJ-45 cable and reconnect, the connection will not resume. His installation does not have that problem so I try to see if it will correct the original problem in the previous installation, also Then I could not boot from the SD card any more.
I just found out last night that boot from USB works. However, when booting from mmc, it show the error as given in the serial output below. The image is on the same SD card. For usb booting, I just put it in an USB adapter.
I will try to see if Dave's installation works better. Please let me know if you have any further comments/suggestions.
Thanks for your quick response, as always.

U-Boot 2011.12 (Apr 08 2012 - 19:03:41)
Cloud Engines-Pogoplug v4/Mobile:MMC version

SoC:   Kirkwood 88F6281_A1
DRAM:  128 MiB
WARNING: Caches not enabled
NAND:  128 MiB
In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Net:   egiga0
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0
(Re)start USB...
USB:   Register 10011 NbrPorts 1
USB EHCI 1.00
scanning bus for devices... 1 USB Device(s) found
       scanning bus for storage devices... 0 Storage Device(s) found
** Block device usb 0 not supported
** Block device usb 0 not supported
Wrong Image Format for bootm command
ERROR: can't get kernel image!
mmc - MMC sub-system

Usage:
mmc init [dev] - init MMC sub system
mmc device [dev] - show or set current device
** Bad partition 1 **
** Bad partition 1 **
Wrong Image Format for bootm command
ERROR: can't get kernel image!
Unknown command 'ide' - try 'help'
** Block device ide 0 not supported
** Block device ide 0 not supported
Wrong Image Format for bootm command
ERROR: can't get kernel image!
......

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/26/2014 03:39PM by twinclouds.

Twinclouds,

Since you have serial console, you can try UART booting with the new u-boot before flashing. The new u-boot is much more robust in dealing with SD card. I recall there were reports that some SD card could not be initialized properly with davygavy's U-boot (it is still a test version), but works fine with new u-boot.

Note: it seems your env is not correctly set. You should not see this:

mmc - MMC sub-system

Usage:
mmc init [dev] - init MMC sub system
mmc device [dev] - show or set current device

-bodhi
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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/26/2014 04:13PM by bodhi.

Bodhi:
Do you have any idea what might cause this?

twinclouds Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Bodhi:
> Do you have any idea what might cause this?

I mentioned above. Different versions of kwsdio driver is used in your installed u-boot and this new u-boot. Perhaps your installed u-boot does not read this SD card correctly.

To verify, boot your Pogo with UART using the new u-boot, interrupt it at the countdown and initialize it:

mmc rescan

-bodhi
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Bodhi:
I checked the env variable mmc_init. It shows

mmc_init=mmc rescan

After I changed it to

mmc_init=mmc init

It can boot from usb and SD. However, the original definition was from: http://download.qnology.com/pogoplug/v4/uboot.2014.07-tld-1.environment.img.bodhi.tar Was it defined this way for a reason?
In any case, it works now. Thank you for your help, as always.

twinclouds,

The old u-boot, which is what you have, use mmc init. The new u-boot uses mmc rescan. So in your current installation, mmc rescan will not work.

-bodhi
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I see. Thanks.

@twinclouds,

I've posted a question on A10 forum:
http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?6,12905,17345#msg-17345

-bodhi
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Hi, Bodhi:
I will take a look and reply. Thanks.

Hi, Bodhi:
I tried to install Asterisk 11 on Pogo Mobile. As a prerequest, it was askin to install linux-headers-3.14.0-kirkwood-tld-1. apt-get install says couldn't fine the package. Do you know where I get this package? Thanks.

Twinclouds,

It's in the kernel tarball in the kernel and rootfs thread.

Quote

Updated 04 April 2014:

Kernel 3.14.0-kirkwood-tld-1 package was uploaded. This kernel 3.14 release has lots of new features:
LinuxChanges log

I have also incorporated the following requests:
pbg4's patch for dvb-usb-dw2102, tt-s2-4600 and some other dvb-usb S2 devices
Request for more USB HIDDEV kernel config options

Download at Dropbox:
linux-3.14.0-kirkwood-tld-1-bodhi.tar.bz2
md5:
3885d603208e83af36524a42c6a6f119

This tarball contains 4 files:

linux-image-3.14.0-kirkwood-tld-1_1.0_armel.deb
linux-headers-3.14.0-kirkwood-tld-1_1.0_armel.deb
config-3.14-kirkwood-tld-1
linux-3.14.0-tld-1-kirkwood.patch

-bodhi
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Bodhi:
Thanks.

Somehow, I made the wifi work on the Pogo Mobile 4 based on Qui Hong's recent tutorial on this subject. It seems only working on 3.14 kerner but not stable on 3.16. It isn't much different from what I did before but at least it works now. The only thing I found is that the Pogo mobile is some how picky about the SD card. It stopped working after a while with some of the SD cards installed not others.
I tried it on Dockstar. It didn't work directly, but my previous hack still works by adding the following lines at the end of the rc.local file before exit:

sleep 5
if ifconfig wlan0 | grep "inet addr:" ; then
  ifconfig eth0 down
  route add default gw 192.168.2.1
fi

Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 12/04/2014 01:53PM by twinclouds.

@twinclouds,

have you tried just asterisk 11 or have you tried baking chan dongle and the associated patch (https://github.com/jstasiak/asterisk-chan-dongle) into rootfs...?

I am trying to configure a pogo v4 as gsm gateway by booting from a SD card..

any pointers to get these 3 baked into a rootfs so i can deploy the customized rootfs without compiling sources etc.,,


Thanks!

Not sure I have seen or replied this message before, but in any case, I didn't done anything about the GSM gateway. However, the easiest way to install asterisk 11 I found was just use Backport (https://wiki.debian.org/Backports) and then simply do a apt-get install asterisk. It should work.