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I haven't seen much posted on the SheevaPlug installation lately (this year). My NSLU2 just died for the first time after many years of great service. Rather than diagnose it to figure out why, I used this as an opportunity to upgrade to a SheevaPlug (which I just received). I'm surprised at the complexity of the SheevaPlug installation considering it has Ubuntu on it. I'm pretty sure I didn't need to load Linux on my PC to install on the NSLU2, but nevertheless, here are my questions:

1. Are the installation instructions still only "alpha" as they indicate?
2. Are the installation instructions still the "best practice"?
3. The Ubuntu which is preinstalled on the SheevaPlug is not good enough and I still need to create the 4GB SD image with Debian, right?
4. The Debian/Kirkwood/SheevaPlug plug page says I only need upgrade uboot if it is 3.4.19 (or earlier) or 3.4.27. Is that true for meteohub as well or do I always need to update uboot?
5. If I only need to change uboot if it is a version listed above, is there a way to check the uboot version via a PuTTY SSH connection?

Thanks for all your help. I haven't been on this forum since Meteohub version 2.

Jeff

Jeffsbach wrote:1. Are the installation instructions still only "alpha" as they indicate?
2. Are the installation instructions still the "best practice"?
3. The Ubuntu which is preinstalled on the SheevaPlug is not good enough and I still need to create the 4GB SD image with Debian, right?
4. The Debian/Kirkwood/SheevaPlug plug page says I only need upgrade uboot if it is 3.4.19 (or earlier) or 3.4.27. Is that true for meteohub as well or do I always need to update uboot?
5. If I only need to change uboot if it is a version listed above, is there a way to check the uboot version via a PuTTY SSH connection?

ad 1) they do work. Meteohub Resellers in US and UK did practice this a lot
ad 2) for meteohub, yep
ad 3) "good enough" doesn't nail it down, it needs the alligned Meteohub SW stack including the OS to work properly.
ad 4) I don't know if an uboot update itself is still required to have the boot-from-sd option. uboot environment settings will need to be updated anyway.
ad 5) you cannot connect to uboot after linux has booted. Only way is to interrupt uboot with a serial console conncted befor linux boot starts.

Yes, setting up the sheeva is a bit complicated. Therefore, I am happy that resellers do take this burden from users that don't like to go through that hassle.

My 4GB SD card is not the tested version and I get this error when setting up the SD card. Any thoughts? It is a 4GB OCZ class 6 card. Ubuntu says it is msdos format and has 3.8 GB available. Do I need to format it to something else? I got the impression from the instructions that if the SD card wasn't going to work, it would be a runtime error and not an installation error. Although, I could easily be wrong. I'm using Ubuntu live CD v11.04.

ubuntu@ubuntu: sudo dd if=mhplug-v4.7.img of=/dev/SD\ 4GB bs=1M
dd: writing `/dev/SD 4GB': No space left on device
1503+0 records in
1502+0 records out
1575067648 bytes (1.6 GB) copied, 47.036 s, 33.5 MB/s
ubuntu@ubuntu:

I don't think that "/dev/SD 4GB" will address your card at all. Looks like you are writing to a file named "SD 4GB" stored in your PCs folder /dev
Proper devices look like "/dev/sdh". Please consult "dmesg" after inserting the card. This will tell you the right device name. When your Linux does a fancy automount, unmount the device before writing to it. Otherwise things will go wrong.

Really? It looks like the device is "SD 4GB" to me. Do you think the space in the device name is causing a problem? I'll remove it and see what happens.

Okay, fixed it. It wasn't the <space> that you were referring to, huh? This worked (corrected output file) and I successfully logged into meteohub. Now I just need to transfer the license.

ubuntu@ubuntu:/media/PATRIOT$ sudo dd if=mhplug-v4.7.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
3780+0 records in
3780+0 records out
3963617280 bytes (4.0 GB) copied, 774.517 s, 5.1 MB/s
ubuntu@ubuntu:/media/PATRIOT$

Thank you for your help!
Jeff

PS: Is there a repository for recording which SD cards are reliable and which have been problematic?

All SLC are fine, all MLC are risky

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