Yes, since the script just runs when you log in as oem it doesn't matter how you do it. I was assuming someone just taking the Efika out of the box the first time and putting it on the network with no other equipment around except maybe another machine on the network he could type on.

This is the reason i threw ubiquity out the window it wants to only take over and run on the console. A 200 line shell script was much simpler and more flexible for this purpose.
(I modeled it after the OpenBSD installer which is one of my favorite installers and is also a shell script)

I will be doing an update soon that does request a dhcp lease in addition to offering that static IP as a fallback.

I might also be offering a natty version as well down the road.

I just updated the S99oemrc script to try once to get a DHCP lease. in the case that it is unsuccessful it will fall back to setting eth0 to 192.168.93.42. in the case that it is successful it will add 192.168.93.42 to eth0 just in case you cant find the dhcp IP for whatever reason.

the dhcp hostname should look similar to "efikamx-installer-7071bc9ba49c" where the numbered part is the mac address.

I haven't posted new images yet but will do so in a bit and announce them here when they are uploaded.

When the update is done http://steubentech.com/~talon/Efika-MX/headless/ will have two directories: maverick and natty

maverick will have this last update with the dhcp changes and natty will be empty for now but will contain the natty image when it is ready.

for anyone that is interested here are the changes to S99oemrc:

The new version with the dhcp fix is on the website now. don't know when I will post a natty image but I am currently working on a natty image for an in house project so you are likely to see one eventually.

I tried the new version with DHCP fix. It works like a charm, installation finished with no issues, all seems so smooth and solid. I am trying to update to nutty right now.

Thanks a lot for this headless image!

Yes thanks very much for this. I added wireless to the DHCP, junked pulseaudio and now have wonderful music server. Only other point is I couldn't fit it on my 4GB cards. Bought a 8GB Sandisk Ultra SDHC which seems faster that the SSD? So worked out well for me.
Keep up the good work I look forward to the next development.

You can fit it on a smaller card by partitioning the card yourself and using the tar files instead. I ran into this with another 4GB card that was just a tiny bit smaller than my transcend 4GB card. thats why I posted the tar archives as well.

I have tested your image and I have a nice problem. Everytime I log in with ssh, my password is expired. After changing the password, the connection is closed, I log in and my password is again expired.

How I can set the time without logged in?

I have installed with timezone Europe/Berlin.

thx.

That is odd. I'm guessing you get to the setup just fine so you may have one of the machines that doesn't have a correct date. I would try dropping to a shell from the main menu and setting the date/time from the shell. I think ntpdate is installed so doing something like ntpdate tick.usno.navy.mil might help. then you can just re-login and do the setup again. (thats assuming you installed to SSD, otherwise just reload the SD-card as before)

Thanks, works now.

Did you already try installing OpenBSD on the Smarttop?

BTW: Great work. With your "headless" installation the Smarttop has a chance to be a fresh alternative for the (mostly unreliable) *plug boxes. Lets see how long they will last using them 24/7... ;-)

Regards from Germany,

Andreas

I don't think there is an OpenBSD kernel that will run on the Efika MX so no.. I just tried to copy the feel of their very simple shell script based installer.

as for the rest of your post, that was the general idea. I haven't had any problems running it more or less 24/7 yet and with no moving parts or really any amount of heat to speak of generated I can't think of any reason for it to fail other than possibly bad caps or something.

I haven't heard anything about the various plug computers being unreliable (but then again I never owned one). I just set up the installer because I hadn't yet had an HDMI monitor and planned on using my smart top headless 90% of the time.

The first series of Sheeva Plug was unreliable. I got two of those, one was defective already on arrival (SD reader did not work), the other died after half a year of active use.
AFAIK, later series worked fine, except for the Guru Plug Server Plus, as that had overheating problem.
My EFIKA PPC ran day and night for almost five years without any troubles and while it's not yet five years old, my EFIKA MX machines also run fine!
Back to topic: I'm just preparing a demo using your headless image :)

_________________
CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Hello,

First thanks for your work, it's exactly what I'm looking for.

Can you explain or make some documentation on how do you do your image? How update it?

Thanks again

I thought I had a README file that expained that part, but that looks like it was the one for the old Maverick desktop that ran from SD card (which I haven't updated)

I haven't had a chance to update the headless image because I've been working with the Debian armhf stuff lately.

All I really did was use the bare installer image (minus the full desktop install tarball and minus the oemsetup stuff), add an init script that brings up networking and create an installer/setup script that runs when you log into the oem account.

I would like to try and get a squeeze image going (Much more suitable for a server over the long haul than maverick). but I just don't have the time to mess with it right now.

I would really like to get an extra smart top to use as a dedicated server at home for things like an IPv6 gateway and other things like that. But as it is now I'm using both the smart top and smartbook for other projects at the moment.

You can look at the two tar files to see how its put together. the two tarballs are basically copies of eachother except one is mean't to boot off the sd card and the other is a copy of the sd card image that only has just enough changed to make it want to use the SSD instead of the SD card. that second image is stored in /home/oem on the sd card and my scripts use it to install to the SSD.

Since it has been quite a long time without updates and maverick is going to be no longer supported by ubuntu with updates. I have finally released both wheezy (armhf) and squeeze (armel) images.

The images should work much like they did before as far as the install process after booting the SD card. but there are some changes are new with these new images:

1) instead of images that you write to an sd card with dd you will instead download a tar file and extract it with tar xvf squeeze-installer.tar or wheezy-installer.tar once that is done you can cd to the directory it extracts and run sudo ./installheadless.sh /dev/mmcblk0 or whatever the device of your SD card happens to be if you aren't running the script on the Efika.

It will ask you if you are sure and then partition the card, create filesystems and then extract the image onto the card. you will see the files listed as they are extracted and then finally it will tell you when it is safe to remove the card and put it in the efika.

2) I had to tweak /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf because on debian it does not send out its current host name by default.

I had two different solutions for the same problem one for squeeze and one for wheezy

for wheezy it was as easy as adding to the config file. for squeeze it was a lot more involved than that see http://steubentech.com/~talon/blog/blos ... cphostname for what I ended up doing on squeeze.

3) I have not installed the kernel headers but you can grab the kernels from the kernels directory inside of the link given for the downloads later in this post.

4) I have posted the modified debootsrap installer script inside the tools directory on the webserver incase you want to try and re-produce images of your own. be aware that I still ended up tweaking things for these images beyond what the script does. I haven't uploaded the latest to the tools dir yet but you can always find the most recent script at https://github.com/wschaub/install-armhf

The images are in http://steubentech.com/~talon/Efika-MX/headless/


Disclaimer
As with the headless maverick image this is not a genesi supported release and just something I do in my spare time.