Roboard, Linux, boot times?

[ProblemChild]

Good that you are cracking on sorting out your problems there!!
Are yo powering your drive off the USB or from a separate PSU I found that a big difference even though it says it's a 2A regulator

I got all the way through with Fedora 10 but the network interface was problematic but I did my initial boot from a USB stick then finished from the DVD drive

John

[RogueWarrior65]

IMHO, This is the kind of stuff that should have been worked out by the manufacturer. Nevertheless, when you finally get it all sorted out, would you mind writing up what you did in nauseating detail and posting it?

[winchy_matt]

Are yo powering your drive off the USB or from a separate PSU I found that a big difference even though it says it's a 2A regulator
John

The DVD-ROM has an external PSU. I'm currently running the RoBoard from a 7V 2A supply. I don't think I have had any power issues yet!

[ProblemChild]

Yippie!!

I'am da daddy !!!

I now have Fedora 11 working well on the ROBoard ...Well at that!

Method :

External USB DVD drive Externally powered too!!
8GB sd card

Fedora 11 i386 version (important that i386 bit)
USB keyboard/mouse

Insert Disc in drive
Boot RoBoard
Press Del go into BIOS and select the DVD as primary boot device
Boot from disc
Select Basic VGA driver (the 2nd one If I remember!)
Follow instructions (expect booting to be SLOOOOOOW)
Format your disc etc
for installation deselect the "office productivity"
Select "software development" ..yes we are going to develop stuff!
keep going forward let it start installing

Go out to the Pub get Drunk this will take HOURS ..well over 4

come back remove dvd from drive reboot
The Roboard WILL BE VERY SLOW to Reboot into the graphical interface
go through the finish script!

There you go one F11 cooked nicely ready to go

Better idea is to change the runlevel to 3 not 5 and use text mode this saves over 150MB of RAM!!!!

you will need to set up networking to boot using the /etc/init.d/network scripts not the network manager.


I'll write that bit up later if any one is interested

You are ready to go ....SWEET !!!

John

[winchy_matt]

Well I'm giving up with the debian install for now. After about the 10th attempt it looked like I cracked it.. the installation completed, but after a reboot I was not able to log in

Again I had no luck installing to the SD card when it was plugged directly into the RoBoard. I had to install to a USB/SD card converter plugged into one of the USB slots.

Also the only way my DVD-ROM will work is if I set the USB 2.0 mode to "Full Speed" in the bios settings. "Hi Speed" wouldn't work.

I installed debian on a new SD card, so I may go back to it and take a look at some point, but for now I'm going to stick with the X-Linux install.

[ProblemChild]

Well to be honest I'm a bit disappointed in the "quality" of the delivered software/hardware package. I'm still @ work fixing other stuff with the board on my desk and because they only supply Debian Binaries I downloaded the source and was going to compile it!! No problem for me as it's my job ...sorta.. !

Any way I start off the make and all sorts of errors. Now I sorted it because I had a little understanding (all the Header files were in capitols not lower case as in the actual source code!!)

Now this is a real *DUMB* error a school boy would make and quite obviously they have never used the source in this form to create the libraries.

<Johnny>

I have now compiled them on both my desktop and Roboard but i have 12volts powering the Roboard at the moment from out of a hard drive molex connector and it will kill any servo I have ;(

Must now wait until the weekend to test it but at least it now "looks" good!!

John

[roboard]

Any way I start off the make and all sorts of errors. Now I sorted it because I had a little understanding (all the Header files were in capitols not lower case as in the actual source code!!)

Hi, John,

do you mean the RoBoIO library? We really make its Debain binary directly from the source on Debain 4.0.

The corresponding makefile for Debian 4.0 is Make.LINUX, and the Debian user can type "make -f Make.LINUX" to compile the RoBoIO.

[ProblemChild]

Downloaded 1.5b earlier this week and dis that build.
Fundamentally the file names are in Capitals and are referred to in Lower-case so it's not going to happen with out a little massaging of the file names regardless to whether it's me/you or Superman doing the compilation.

Ether way once this is done it appears to compile ok I shall play with it later on.

John

[winchy_matt]

I have made some progress with the RoBoard and the supplied ghost Linux image, I have started a thread in my own forum, mostly so that I can keep track of my own progress, being a newbie to Linux, I have to write everything down.. or may that's just age

I did manage to get the boot time down to 10sec. just by tweaking bios etc.. more info here: http://hexapodrobot.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=352&start=0

[ProblemChild]

Good Post ... It's a pritty. It aint 10 seconds from power on but a great improvement none the less!!

Maybe we should Just get the RN to plug it's self in and be powered up 24x7


WARNNING----ROBOT Is ONLINE !!

[winchy_matt]

Good Post ... It's a pritty. It aint 10 seconds from power on but a great improvement none the less!!

It is 10 sec from power on!

[ProblemChild]

Coolio

Unfortunately I'm been a smart $$$$ and want to run the compiler etc on the ROBOard so I'll pay in boot up times /memory usage.

Did you use the Supplied Libs for the LED Test program or hit the hardware directly?

I take it that you are still Writing C rather than boding someone elses like me!

Lets have a look at it

Best of luck
John

[winchy_matt]

I just wrote my own GPIO code for the LEDs, there are no libs for Linux. I posted the code HERE.

[ProblemChild]

Very Good Matt ... nice code to the point no pointless messing! Does this run under Linux with the various kernel protection measures .etc etc Or with DOS ??

[winchy_matt]

Runs under Linux as root user.