Here she comes, big as life

What seems like eons ago, I ordered one of those SheevaPlug Development Kits. After about six weeks, they got around to shipping it, and then, yesterday, after I assume a tortoise had piloted it across the country on broken tricycle, it was finally delivered to me.

I booted it up, observed that there was some kind of Ubuntu thing on it, and set myself to correct that problem. Within an hour I had managed to lock myself out.

Here is something I should have read beforehand.

Thanks to Martin Michlmayr, it is now running Debian and allowing me to log in.

Here are some steps to follow if you would like to boot Debian off of a USB stick plugged into your Sheevaplug:

• Grab the tarball from http://people.debian.org/~tbm/sheevaplug/lenny/

• Make an ext3 filesystem on the first partition of your USB stick (ext2 will not work with the current image)

• Mount the USB stick's filesystem, unpack the tarball onto it, then unmount

• Plug the USB stick into the SheevaPlug's full-sized USB port

• Plug the SheevaPlug in, and use minicom or your favorite terminal program to console in over the mini-USB port (don't forget that you need to use the ftdi_sio module instead of usbserial; 115200,N,8,1, no flow control)

• Abort the autoboot, and type the following commands:

  setenv mainlineLinux yes setenv arcNumber 2097 saveenv reset setenv bootargsroot 'root=/dev/sda1 rootdelay=10' setenv bootcmdusb 'usb start; ext2load usb 0:1 0x0800000 /boot/uInitrd; ext2load usb 0:1 0x400000 /boot/uImage' setenv bootcmd 'setenv bootargs $(console) $(bootargsroot); run bootcmdusb; bootm 0x400000 0x0800000' saveenv run bootcmd

That should be all there is to it.

Next I'm wondering if SDIO wireless cards work.