SheevaPlug - Let's get cracking!

Alright, now that we have our new shiny SheevaPlug, let's get started.

1. Of course, first thing we want is a serial console to the Linux OS, so we'll plug the mini <-> std USB cable provided to one of our USB ports and find out if Vista (x64) is able to figure out the FT2232D driver itself... which it can't (surprise, surprise). No big deal. The PDF readme from the DevKit CD tells you that you can find the TeraTerm Windows drivers in the SheevaPlug_Host_SWsupportPackageWindowsHost.zip or, for a more up to date version, at http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/D2XX.htm. Installing the drivers with Vista autodetect is still a pain, as you don't get the option to browse to the driver directory (yes, Microsoft, all your users are complete tools - that's why they use your products in the first place!), but with the device manager, you're good to go. Yay, another COM port! Yay a set of USB Serial converters!
   
   
2. Alrighty, if we have our COM port, so we're good to go with the ever versatile putty. The FIRST thing you want to know is that the serial console is set to 115200 bauds, and the SECOND thing is that the default logon is root/nosoup4u (Globalscale: even their passwords are cool!). And we're in... Niiiiiice! dmesg, df -h, top, they're all waiting for you, but first you might as well wanna change the date & time, as mine was set to Apr 22 1953. That's like, way old! Also, since you're gonna wanna try a reboot to see what the console spills out, I'll just mention that there's a very loooong pause during boot after the line "eth0: link up, full duplex, speed 1 Gbps", so just be patient, you will get your logon prompt. Oh and you'll see warnings here and there as well, but what do you expect.
   
   
3. What do we have here? Ubuntu? Huh, well, at least it's Debian based and we have a good chunk of space left. We could have fared much much worse (read anything that's based on Red Hat). We'll install armedslack soon enough but let's get cracking then. Of course, we'll want to recompile stuff on the device itself (something that can't be done on a WRT!). Let's start by compiling the very handy memtester to do a little bit of torture test, and see how much the baby heats up when using RAM.
   
   
4. According to google, installing gcc on the SheevaPlug ios as easy as running: "apt-get install build-essential"... Except that you are missing the cache directory so the command fails. You need to issue a
   

   mkdir -p /var/cache/apt/archives/partial

   before you can use apt-get (and you might want to add this line to your /etc/rc.local as well). But we're still not out of the woods yet, as the package upgrade seems to start up fine, but after a while, you get errors like:

   Failed to fetch http://ports.ubuntu.com/pool/main/b/binutils/binutils_2.19.0.20090110-0ubuntu1_armel.deb  404 Not Found

   Checking that URL confirms that the package is no longer hosted there.
   Drats!
   
   
5. The easiest solution at this stage is to update your system as a whole with "apt-get update". This might take a while, but it seemed to get the problem sorted, as the subsequent "apt-get install build-essential" completed hapilly. You might also want to run an "apt-get autoremove" after that, to free up some space. Good, now we can compile natively on the plug.
   
   
6. "-bash: wget: command not found"? Who on earth delivers a system without wget? "apt-get install wget" then, but sheesh! But then...

   root@debian:/usr/src# wget http://pyropus.ca/software/memtester/old-versions/memtester-4.1.2.tar.gz
   --2009-10-02 14:05:28--  http://pyropus.ca/software/memtester/old-versions/memtester-4.1.2.tar.gz
   Resolving pyropus.ca... failed: Name or service not known.
   wget: unable to resolve host address `pyropus.ca'

   Indeed, DNS resolution doesn't seem to work out of the box and the default /etc/resolv.conf goes something like:

   domain lan
   search lan
   nameserver 127.0.0.1

   It's clear that with only these 3 lines, you're not gonna get very far (it's a wonder apt-get still managed to find its way - must be using direct IPs). Let's just comment the domain & search lines and add our ISP's nameservers before the 127.0.0.1 to get some resolution going. Now, please be aware that any changes you make here won't hold on reboot, so for more details on how to fix the default annoyance, you might as well have a look at the New Plugger Howto from openplug.org.
   
   
7. Good, now we can wget memtester, compile it and run it (and it looks like our RAM is good). Maybe I'll try mprime later on as well... But to complete the setup of a half decent Linux system, let's issue an "apt-get install screen.

Next, we'll try to play with JTAG and OpenOCD...