New supported Hardware: DreamPlug

[admin]

This is just to let you know that I am working on a port of the SheevaPlug successor, called DreamPlug, from Globalscale.
Porting works fine so far. It will need a different SD card image, but overall changes compared to SheevaPlug are not that spectacular.

US: http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/ ... evkit.aspx
Europe: http://www.newit.co.uk/shop/proddetail. ... =DreamPlug

Advantages of DreamPlug compared to SheevaPlug are:
- integrated SD card slot, SD card no longer sticking out, more reliable mechanical solution
- integrated WLAN
- two USB ports
- DreamPlug offers more connectors/jacks (e-sata, mic, headphone, 2nd ethernet, bluetooth) but Meteohub does not make use of these

Disadvantages:
- costs 149 USD (instead of 99 USD for SheevaPlug)

When port is finalized you will get instructions/downloads how to configure a DreamPlug to become a Meteohub.

Stay tuned...

[admin]

The port is done. Even WLAN (although being a SDIO connected device, nit PCI or USB as usually) is working!

Meteohub Website is also updated to reflect this new option. Details how to transform a DreamPlug into a Meteohub can be found here:
http://www.meteohub.de/files/How-To_Bui ... amPlug.pdf

From just released version 4.7g on, Meteohub updates will support DreamPlug as a new family member.

[rigel]

Great to see this. Does this also work with GuruPlug? if not, should we assume there will be no port in the future for GuruPlug? thanks

[admin]

there will be no guruplug port. i have a guruplug plus but this suffered so much from heat problems that i decided not to port. dreamplug looks like a much better second gen sheevaplug to me, although i find it a bit pricy. but formfactor, a fully physically integrated sd card slot and the integrated wlan are on the plus side.

[stefferber]

I am running the DreamPlug for 11 days now and I am really happy. I can recommend to order it with preinstalled meteohub software. One more advantage with the DreamPlug is that you can detach the power supply. Then it is not plugged directly to a socket and can be mounted somewhere.

[admin]

where do you get it with meteohub preinstalled?

[stefferber]

I got it from NewIT in UK.

[stefferber]

I am using my DreamPlug happly since the last posts above. But as Debian Lenny is not supported any more I encounter some problems now adding new software e.g. perl is outdated with perl 5.10.0-19l

I am using now these package sources in /etc/apt/source.list

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deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/ lenny main
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/ lenny main

The following repository is "lost in space"

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# Orion repository
#deb http://people.debian.org/~tbm/orion lenny main

Any idea what's it for and where it is now?

Does anybody have some experience to switch from Debian Lenny to Debian Wheezy via apt-get?
Or do I need a complete new image to do that?
Is there a DreamPlug, Debian Wheezy, Meteohub image available somewhere?

I tried to test a bit in a virtual machine but could not make my dream plug image run in my Oracle Virtual Box VM. And the available Meteohub VM is much different from my dream plug installation...

[stefferber]

Updating to Debian Wheezy looks a little bit more complicated than I thought.
Getting a new Debian image for the dreamplug is easy. This you can download Debian Squeeze or Debian Wheezy here
https://newit.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,2491.0.html

Or you can even by a new SD card with pre-installed Debian Wheezy:
http://www.newit.co.uk/shop/All-DreamPl ... ?limit=100

As I have a pre-installed meteohub SD card on my dreamplug, the dreamplug already boots from the external SD card /dev/sdb :

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# less /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
/dev/sdb2       /               ext3    noatime,errors=remount-ro,commit=120 0       1
/dev/sdb3       none            swap    sw               0       1
/dev/sdb4       /data           ext3    noatime,errors=remount-ro,commit=120 0       1
tmpfs           /var/lock       tmpfs   mode=755,size=8M        0       0
tmpfs           /var/run        tmpfs   mode=755,size=32M        0       0
tmpfs           /var/log        tmpfs   mode=755,size=32M       0       0
mars:/home      /server         nfs     noauto

The internal micro SD card /dev/sda is not used at all

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# ls -l /dev/sd*
brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8,  0 Sep  8 10:03 /dev/sda
brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8,  1 Sep  8 10:03 /dev/sda1
brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8,  2 Sep  8 10:03 /dev/sda2
brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8, 16 Sep  8 10:03 /dev/sdb
brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8, 17 Sep  8 10:03 /dev/sdb1
brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8, 18 Sep  8 10:03 /dev/sdb2
brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8, 19 Sep  8 10:03 /dev/sdb3
brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8, 20 Sep  8 10:03 /dev/sdb4 

Which is really a pity as all the free memory space of the internal SD card is not used:

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Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2             3.6G  539M  2.9G  16% /tmp/filesystem-sda2

The meteohub ready made image is a 4GB Debian Lenny
http://wiki.meteohub.de/Images

Well anyway. My final questions remains:

How do I install all the meteohub specific files on top of the 16GB Debian Wheezy Image?

[admin]

There is no simple 1-2-3 to achieve that and I would not recommend
spending hours on that. Even if you succeed in setting it up, i wont
expect Meteohub updates doing proper work on that anymore.

Of course you can do as you like, but please understand that I cannot
recommend such individual changes that will open the door to "support hell".
You are on your own here.

[stefferber]

My manual migration to squeeze is under way. The only and big issue is the change of boot sequence. During the distribution upgrade I get

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apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
[...]

Unable to migrate to dependency-based boot system                                       
Tests have determined that problems in the boot system exist which
prevent migration to dependency-based boot sequencing:

insserv: warning: script 'K20loggerd' missing LSB tags and overrides, 
insserv: warning: script 'K20ddclient' missing LSB tags and overrides, 
insserv: warning: script 'loggerd' missing LSB tags and overrides, 
insserv: script rsync: service rsyncd already  provided!, 
insserv: warning: script 'ddclient' missing LSB tags and overrides, ,
package at removed but not purged, package exim4-base removed but not purged                                                                               

If the reported problem is a local modification, it needs to be fixed
manually. If it's a bug in the package, it should be reported to the
BTS and fixed in the package. See
http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot for more
information about how to fix the problems preventing migration.
                                                                                                                                
To reattempt the migration process after the problems have been fixed,
run "dpkg-reconfigure sysv-rc".

The files are located here

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/etc/rc0.d/K20loggerd
/etc/rc1.d/K20loggerd
/etc/rc6.d/K20loggerd

/etc/rc0.d/K20ddclient
/etc/rc1.d/K20ddclient
/etc/rc6.d/K20ddclient

/etc/init.d/loggerd

/etc/init.d/ddclient
/etc/default/ddclient
/etc/ppp/ip-up.d/ddclient

Looks I solved the 'ddclient' by unpacking the file 'd_ddclient.lsb" by hand.

But where do the other files come from?
Looks like openembedded and meteohub?
Any idea how to add the LSB conform commands to these scripts?

[stefferber]

In order to migrate I simply removed the "rsyncd" and "loggerd" boot script and successfully made it to Debian Squeeze:

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meteoplug:~# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Debian
Description:	Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.7 (squeeze)
Release:	6.0.7
Codename:	squeeze

After rebooting I copied the start scripts back to /etc/init.d/ and started the two services by hand:

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/etc/init.d/rsyncd start 
/etc/init.d/loggerd start

Meteohub sensor data is collected but I receive this error message in the "system info" menus

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Error file open: /var/run/dropbear.pid: No such file or directory
Error file open: /var/run/smbd.pid: No such file or directory
...
Weather Data Recomputation:	completed
Weather Data Logging:	running (last data: never)
SSH Login:	stopped
SMB Shares:	stopped
Time Synchonization:	running

Looks like samba does not work. But there is something else wrong, isn't it?

[stefferber]

So finally I gave up to migrate the linux distribution completely.

I only installed exactly the debian packages that I needed for node.js which requires python which requires g++ which requires …
This requires to use

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apt-get install nodejs
apt-get install npm

and multiple changes in the "/etc/apt/source.list" to multiple debian distributions in order to get the exact version of a package. Well about 5h of hacking