[ARMedslack] ARMedSlack on Seagate Dockstar

Tue Dec 28 21:12:10 UTC 2010

I wasn't to sure how you got the installer running over ssh, so here's 
what I did. First, my dockstar is running Jeff Doozan latest uboot and 
Rescue System, so when I boot without any usb drives plugged in it boots 
into the Rescue System (http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?4,831). I 
connect to the dockstar via ssh (the rescue system starts dhcp). 
Although I do have the serial line running, I just use it to monitor 
what going on since I'm trying to figure out how to install armedslack 
without a serial line. (I've got two other dockstars waiting in the 
wings). Once I'm connected I do the following:

Prepare a directory for change root  file system

1) mkdir /tmp/armedslack

2) cd /tmp/armedslack

Download the armedslack uinitrd (has the installer) and decompress it

# wget 
ftp://ftp.armedslack.org/armedslack/armedslack-13.1/isolinux/uinitrd-kirkwood.img 

# dd if=uinitrd-kirkwood.img bs=64 skip=1 | gzip -dc | cpio -div

Now thing get a little fuzzy for me, since I really don't have a deep 
knowledge of what I'm doing. I found through googling that I had to do 
the following mounts before I changed rooted into the installer fs. It 
seems to br needed to mount a usb stick and its the only way to get nano 
running; i don't know how to use vim .

#mount /proc/ /tmp/armedslack/proc

# mount /dev/ /tmp/armedslack/proc

# chroot /tmp/armedslack /bin/bash

#TERM=linux

Now plug in a usb drive, run fdisk or cfdisk and partition the drive. 
Since I using Doozan uboot / needs to be on sda1. I partitioned my 4G 
usb stick with 3.75G sda1 for \ and sda2 as a 250M swap.

OK, now run the armedslack installer.

#./usr/lib/setup/setup

This will resulted in running the armedslack installer. The only thing 
of note here is that I selected a ftp install and connect to the 
ftp.armedslack.org using its ip address (83.170.96.167). After 
successfully connecting to the repos, I then select the packages and the 
installer proceeds to install the packages. With my usb stick and 
depending on the packages selected this can take a few hours to install. 
I found that using my Seagate Freeagent 500GM disk loads much faster. 
Once everything is installed and the setup is complete (network, root 
password, services etc) I exit out of the installer and then add the 
following sym links since Doozan uboot looks for uImange and uInitrd to 
boot.

#cd /boot

# ln -s uinitrd-kickwood-2.6.35.5 uInitrd

# ln -s uImage-kirkwood-2.6.35.5 uImage

Then I exist out of the changed root environment and reboot the dockstar.

After all this and with using the serial output to monitor the process, 
the kernel does boot but gets a fdisk error and stalls for 60 second and 
then reboots, repeating the sequence over and over. See the attached 
file for the boot output and fdisk error from the serial link. It seems 
to have something to do with the dockstar not having a real time clock 
and getting time stamp errors. I am able to fix this by doing the 
following.

1) Add the following line in rc.S right at the beginning

/bin/mount -n -o remount,ro /

2) add an e2fsck,config file to /etc/. The file that i use can be found 
here.

ftp://laprjns.com/in/e2fsck.conf

Once I added these, rebooting results in going through a successful 
fdisk on the / fs. After completing the fdisk, it successfully reboots 
to the armedslack prompt. Since it's fdisk'ing and rebooting it does 
take a little while to come up . Also found that once I successfully 
booted, I then can remove both the mount line in rc.S and the e2fsck.con 
file and boot the system there after.

I sure that there is a better way to get the installer running, but as I 
said my linux knowledge is limited.

Regards

Rich Lapointe (laprjns)

On 12/21/2010 05:13 AM, Stuart Winter wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Rich wrote:
>
>    
>> My testing indicates that it not getting an ip assign during initialization
>> because the rc.inet1.conf file isn't configured   I'm a wimp, so I've been
>> using serial cable to observe what is happening.
>>      
> Since you have a serial cable, can you also try booting the installer?
>
> This is what the others have been struggling with -- why doesn't the
> installer get an IP?  If you boot using the config lines found here:
> ftp://ftp.armedslack.org/armedslack/armedslack-devtools/sheevaplug/quickboot.txt
>
> Take the line below this heading:
> "-current (automatically starting DHCP and SSHd)"
>
> The system should boot and get an IP from DHCP.
>
> Can you see what is happening?
>
>    
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