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  • Author Author: bwelsby
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Arch Linux on the RIoTboard

bwelsby

First of all let me just say that my preferred Linux distribution is Debian and thanks to the excellent work by Selsinork  I have just what I want.

However, just for fun I thought I would see how easy it would be to get other distributions working so for a start I had a go at Arch Linux and was pleasantly surprised how easy it was.

 

For this exercise  I used a Debian vbox on my PC and when I attach a uSD card via a USB adaptor it comes up as /dev/sdb

 

1. take a uSD  card with a working  Debian from Selsinork's creation see The specified item was not found. and associated posts. All I really needed was the installed u-boot and some other required files but as I already had working cards it was the easiest way to start.

 

Mount the cards rootfs on my vbox as /mnt

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

 

2. copy off the card the following files and save for later in a directory ~/dsave

 

mkdir ~/dsave

cp /mnt/bootscript ~/dsave

cp /mnt/extlinux.conf ~/dsave

cp /boot/imx6dl-riotboard.dts ~/dsave

 

3. reformat the rootfs partition ext4

 

umount /mnt

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1

 

 

4. remount the blank file system

 

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

 

5. get the new rootfs ARMv7 Multi-platform from Downloads | Arch Linux ARM and install on card

 

wget http://archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-armv7-latest.tar.gz

tar xvf ArchLinuxARM-arm7-latest.tar.gz -C /mnt

 

 

6. Now copy the saved files back

 

cp ~/dsave/bootscript /mnt

cp ~/dsave/extlinux.conf /mnt

cp ~/dsave/imx6dl-riotboard.dts /mnt/boot

cp ~/dsave/imx6dl-riotboard.dts /mnt/boot/imx6dl-riotboard.dts.rec

cp /mnt/boot/zImage /mnt/boot/zImage.rec

     (the last two provide the recovery files for the boot-up option and can be ignored for now and created later)

 

7 Now we need to create an fstab entry for the rootfs otherwise it gets mounted read only

    edit /mnt/etc/fstab and add the following

 

/dev/mmcblk0p1    /    auto    errors=remount-ro    0    1

 

 

8. now flush any pending writes and unmount the card

cd

sync

umount /mnt

 

9. Insert the uSD card in the RIoTboard (boot switches set for uSD) and power up.

NOTE:  A debug serial console connection is required to see the boot-up and complete the next stage as the HDMI screen will not be enabled.

On the serial console the system should boot up and prompt for login.

 

Login as root

password  root

 

You should also have an ethernet connection which should come up DHCP

you can now perform an upgrade with:

pacman -Syu

 

This will update a few things including the kernel and firmware.

After this update reboot and it will also bring up a login on the HDMI screen.

 

There you have it, I don't expect everything to be fully working, there may be issues somewhere but this is as far as I go

If anyone is interested I will make a card image file available for download.

  • in reply to bwelsby

    Guys

    As someone who has very little knowledge of the inner workings of Linux, I appreciate the work you are both doing.

     

    Please keep it up.

     

    thanks

    Mark

  • in reply to e14 Contributor

    I should say that after the upgrade the hdmi is coming up full 1920x1080 HD resolution on my monitor.

    I did also try building the kernel from your blog posts (with cgroups for the system image) and that worked too but then I had some issues with the Ethernet not coming up, I could bring it up manually with netctl start eth0 but the bootup systemd failed, a pacman upgrade overwrote with their kernel and then the problem went away. If time allows I will compare kernel configs and maybe produce a better / correct build for the RIoTboard.

  • in reply to e14 Contributor

    The kernel version in the Multi-platform download is Linux 3.14.4-1-ARCH

    After upgrade it's Linux version 3.15.2-1-ARCH

     

    Yes I expect there will be some things that don't work but at least it appears to be stable...  no kernel panics yet image.

  • Out of curiosity, when it updates the kernel what version does it use ?  I'm interested in why there's no hdmi output as hdmi certainly works on debian, so there's some unknown difference there. (also, a kernel less than 3.16-rc will have issues with i2c4 unless they've backported the patch)

     

    I used to like Arch, but after their crazy break-everything move to /usr I don't use it anymore. I'd rather not use something where the devs don't care about killing your system on upgrade image