It's Alive!!!!

This has been a good week for my project, which has unfortunately been in incubation until now. I finally received the EFIKA unit in December, but could not focus on starting the project until after the holiday. Sadly, I found myself out of work in January and could not afford to gather the needed parts. But things are much better for me as I am now working again, and have finally been able to acquire the pieces I need to get started!

Earlier this week I got the unit working with a video card, ps2/usb keyboard adapter and ps/2 keyboard, and monitor. I have a free network card in my Linux box and have been studying up on how to configure it to serve as a dhcp/tftp server for #PXE net booting the EFIKA.

I am debating whether to go Debian or Gentoo on the EFIKA. I am more comfortable with the Debian base as I have been using Ubuntu as my primary OS since the days of Warty release candidates. But I have always been attracted to Gentoo for it's optimization (being a source distro). Since the EFIKA is a limited-resource environment I am leaning strongly in that direction. However I believe I will try to work with both in parallel if only for the learning experience. LFS (Linux From Scratch) is also in the back of my mind, where it will stay for the time being.

This weekend I hope to have some significant progress, as I now have a hard disk to work with. I am not so sure that the final product will have a hard disk, but it will make development much easier at this point as I cannot afford a large flash disk. Since this is to be put in possibly extreme environs, I would rather go for CF than a mechanical drive.

A major decision will eventually have to be made regarding the radios for wireless networking. But there is much work to be done before I am ready to focus on that aspect. Fortunate, since there is no way I can afford those parts right now. In the meantime I have been looking around at some ideas.

Before the EFIKA came on the radar for me, I had been interested in some of the products www.routerboard.com offers. Besides their "router boards", they sell some PCI cards that give you 1, 4, or 8 mini-PCI slots to work with. They also have some PCI 4-port 10/100 ethernet cards. What I would like to find is a PCI multi-port ethernet card that has at least two mini-PCI slots on it. I will have to look at getting a different riser, too, as the supplied one only gives me an AGP port. I would want a right-angle PCI adapter, because my hope is to keep the end product compact.

The reason I want the mini-PCI slots is because I am interested in this...

http://www.deviceforge.com/news/NS4426104253.html

Also see...

http://www.linuxelectrons.com/news/embe ... -pci-wimax

Here we have a reference WiMAX mini-PCI solution that may be perfect for development as the back-haul wireless networking hardware for our MESH network. And being mini-PCI, it would be a minor part change to substitute mini-PCI WiFi parts in units that can support the local area wireless network at a disaster site. Multi-radio units designed to go up-the-pole would provide our WiMAX MESH back-haul network, and units on-the-ground would provide WiFi a/b/g/n access points. This is the concept.


Well enough talk there is work to be done this weekend. I will keep you all posted. My project page is at...

http://projects.powerdeveloper.org/project/efika/81

PS - When will the project pages accept updates again??? I would love to be blogging this.

Peace!
Tim

You will be able to post again soon.

Good work Timothy!

R&B :)

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

After a looooong fight I am managing to get the EFIKA to pull an image down to net-boot. I could not for the life of me get either atftpd or tftpd-hpa (tried both) to listen on my Ubuntu box's 2nd ethernet port. They would both serve out to computers on my regular LAN (192.168..), and using Wireshark to trace I could see that my box was seeing the EFIKA make requests on the right port when connected to my 2nd interface (10.1.1..)... DHCP was working fine. Ugh!

So I eventually manually configured the EFIKA to static addresses and plugged it in my LAN router. Static, to avoid it dealing with my router's dhcp server, which I can not configure for the tftp server address and file name. (It's a d-link unit). Still having no joy, I looked in all my logs and noticed that the EFIKA was showing up in the atftpd.log file, but it was requesting the wrong file!! Apparently if you enable the diag-mode on the EFIKA it will use the "diag-file" setting for it's tftp file rather than what is expected. So after that eureka moment I finally got the EFIKA to download it's file via TFTP!! YAY!!!

Now I have three images I have been trying. One is the di_efika (debian installer) from bplan, the other is the kernel_efika from bplan also (another debian image). And the third is the Gentoo kernel_efika for use when following the instructions on http://gentoo-wiki.com/Efika. Each of them will download fine, but in all three cases I get stuck at this point:
From here I get nothing. Now, mind you, I do not have a serial cable to work with. On the Gentoo kernel I boot with nfsroot, and I have set dropbear to load inside the nfsroot, but cannot connect to it if it is alive. I am presently at a loss, but too tired to keep messing with it right now. I am going to sleep on it. But I welcome any and all suggestions. If there is a console= directive that makes it put the login console on the video card and keyboard that would be perfect.

In any case, wish me luck. I'll check in again soon!

Tim

Hi.

Try adding console=tty and see what happens.


Johan.

_________________
Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

BLOG AWAY!

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

No joy, Johan.. but thank you for the suggestion. I am going to do one more search of the forums and if I find nothing, then I am going to post a shout-out to see if anyone has a more suitable kernel image...

In any case I see that I need to invest in a serial cable. I had struggled for a week with various keyboards before I found one that would work, and it is only being borrowed. I can't keep it forever. The owner will want it back soon enough. (It is actually a very nice one... Logitec wireless bluetooth with USB dongle, the "Bluetooth Wireless Desktop 5000". Go figure, the fancy shmancy oddball set-up is the one that worked) :)

Even if my progress has been slow these past two weeks, I have actually learned a great deal about dhcp, tftp, network packet analysis, bridging and ip masquerading, and even an unexpected "feature" of the OpenFirmware (that the diag mode will use different tftp settings that non-diag mode, for instance).

In the meantime I am collecting more research for the later stages of the project, so time is not being wasted.

Peace!

Tim

Hi.

You could try my kernel:
http://www.cc.puv.fi/~jd/kernel_efika/

Both the kernel and the config are there, so you can compare if you want.
This one should accept the console=tty option, otherwise you won't see the bootup process (but it does boot completely).


Best regards and good luck,
Johan

_________________
Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

Add: video=radeonfb:1024x768@75

Add 'console=ttyS1,115200' when you have a nullmodem cable.
Maybe it's ttyS0 on EFIKA. It's ttyS1 on Pegasos..

Thanks Kristian... I will try that.. but first I will have to swap video cards with my main machine... I am using an nVidia board on the EFIKA right now, but I do happen to have an ATi board in my main box.

Thanks Kristian... I will try that.. but first I will have to swap video cards with my main machine... I am using an nVidia board on the EFIKA right now, but I do happen to have an ATi board in my main box.

On EFIKA it's ttyPSC0. You don't have to specify the baudrate, it's at 115200.


Best regards,
Johan

_________________
Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

Timothy:
Yes, do that. NViDiA is not well supported on Linux/PPC.

Okay so the message about changes at the website has gone. But I cannot figure out how to add to my project blog. When I view the project, it shows me logged in. But I can't seem to find the link that lets me add a blog post to my project page. I did it once back in December, but I seem to remember there being more options on the left-hand column. Where did those go? I must be missing something here somewhere.

Thanks

Tim

I got the installer to work... some notes...

The EFIKA does _NOT_ like the nVidia card that I was using at all. No matter which image I tried to netboot, it would just hang.

The di_efika (debian installer) I had downloaded from bplan was apparently incomplete. I checked md5sum and lo and behold it did not match. I corrected this and got the debian install to work!!!!

I had to abort my installation for non-technical reasons (stole roommate's net access off the home router and he needed it back, he he) But I will have another chance to take a crack at completing the install over the next couple days.

I am going to try and install both Debian (as I am familiar) and Gentoo on my EFIKA. If I can get around Gentoo without too much difficulty I will stick with it. What will probably be my biggest hurdle is building the toolchain to cross-compile on my x86 desktop (Ubuntu). I am completely new to cross-compiling but if I get it set up, a source distro is the best route with limited resource device like EFIKA.

I feel SO MUCH relief that I managed to get past my netboot stalls... Who woulda thunk text-mode would be a problem with nVidia. I was under the impression that it was graphics mode that had trouble... didn't even occur to me that it would be the video card while still in a text-mode installer. That, and I was too lazy to re-configure my desktop so that I could remove the Radeon and put in the nVida. That was a real mess... I still haven't gotten the nVida working right in the deskop. But I am confident I will get it sorted out. The folks on irc.freenode.org #ubuntu are very helpful.

More updates as I have them... and.. the blog when I can figure out how to add to it again... I still can't find the blog entry page. Ugh. But that won't spoil my good mood. I am really excited to be working with the EFIKA. This is going to be a great project for me in so many ways.

PEACE!!
Tim

Okay I have posted an update to my project blog. You can read it here.. http://projects.powerdeveloper.org/project/efika/81

Peace!
Tim