Debian boot

Hi Jeff,

First, I thank you for all your work on the dockstar.

I used your script to install Debian (Lenny and Squeeze) on my Dockstar by it doesn't boot on Debian. I tried many time.

I suppose I should put the dockstar.bin on my Dockstar but it is no longer available on your website (Error 404) (http://jeff.doozan.com/debian/uboot/dockstar.bin).
I don't know if this is normal or not.

I hope you can help me.

Thank you in advance.

Nigo

The dockstar.bin file has been renamed to uboot.mtd3.bin. It doesn't need to be installed separately, it gets installed when your run any of my Debian or uBoot install scripts.

What USB device are you trying to install to? I have a SD card adapter that doesn't work as a boot device and an old 512Mb flash drive that doesn't work. There are also some external hard drives that don't spin up fast enough to be detected. If you have a different USB drive, I'd recommend trying that first.

If that doesn't work, you could always connect a serial cable and watch the boot process. It will show you exactly where it's failing.

-- Jeff

I use a recent 4Go USB flash drive.

I will try with a USB hard drive.

Nigo

Jeff:
I installed Debian using your latest scripts. It booted fine. At first, I cannot connect to it with Putty/SSH. Then I found that the ip address was changed. After change to the correct address, it works fine. Is this normal or just me?

Jeff:
First of all, I would like to thank you for your effort put in. You make everybody's life much easier (for those interested in this topic of course). I installed Debian Squeeze on my Dockstar using your latest scrips and it is working now. Yesterday, I did more experiments with this installation. When I can boot into, it work reliably. However, it is not always the case. I have too try a few times before booting into Debian. My observations are as follows:
For unsuccessful booting, the light is green flashing and then become flashing orange. In such a case, I knew it was in the original Pogoplug operating system. The light on the USB drive is usually on. To be successful, the USB drive light should be off while the green light is flashing. Then the light on Dockstar becomes off and the USB drive's light is on or flashing. If it keep this state (Dockstar light off, USB drive light on) for some time, say 30 seconds, I knew the boot is successful. The most reliable way for the USB drive light start in the off state is to do a hardware reset by pushing the reset button during the orange flashing light.
While this works most of the time, it is still a pain. Is there anything I can do to make the boot more reliable?
Thanks in advance for your advise.

The 'dual boot' issue is a limitation with the Pogoplug uBoot. There are a few possible workarounds:

1) Configure the Pogoplug uBoot to always boot Debian.
Advantage: it's easy. Just run 'blparam bootcmd=run bootcmd_usb'
Disadvantage: If you screw up your Debian install, and you haven't configured the uBoot netconsole, you'll have to connect a serial cable to get into uBoot.

2) Configure the Pogoplug uBoot to boot Debian whenever a network connection is detected.
See here for details.

3) Configure your Pogoplug install to wait for XX seconds and then reboot... just add something like 'sleep 60; reboot' to the end of /etc/init.d/rcS

4) Install my uBoot to mtd0 and install a 'rescue' distro on mtd1 and mtd2. This is the riskiest option, and I have not done it myself. See here for some details.

-- Jeff

Jeff:
Thanks. I will try the option 2 tonight.
If I use the blparam approach, I guess I need to boot to pogoplug first then add the lines in its linux prompt, is this correct? Also, I guess I don't need to do any thing special for the original boot loader, right. Thanks for your help.

Hey there, i've got another problem..

i want to use the 3. option.. But i cant write in the rcS file... sudo doesn't work..
i'm logged in as root...

mount -o rw,remount /

edit rcS

mount -o ro,remount /