New tech toys

A SheevaPlug from New IT (UK), and an old MacBook Pro 17″. I’m going to try to get Fedora for ARM working on the SheevaPlug. The MacBook Pro is 4 years old and was struggling and almost unusably slow under Mac OS X. I put a new hard drive in it and upgraded to Fedora 14, and it’s amazing how fast it has become.

Notes

1. 8GB card from New IT was a dud. Random errors and timeouts when I tried to overwrite it. I’m using the nfsroot configuration until I can get another one.
2. Do not use the kernel suggested in the wiki (uImage-2.6.30-sheevaplug). See this thread. Use the kernels and modules from this site instead.
3. Use usbserial as described here.
4. Don’t use minicom — it always has sucked and always will. Try gtkterm instead.

U-boot (bootloader) voodoo used to get the initial nfsroot Fedora ARM working:

setenv mainlineLinux yes
setenv arcNumber 2097
setenv ipaddr [my static IP]
setenv serverip [my TFTP server IP]
tftpboot 0x6400000 [name of kernel image]
setenv bootargs_root 'root=/dev/nfs rw nfsroot=[NFS server IP]:/mnt/rootfs ip=[static IP]'
setenv bootargs $(console) $(bootargs_root)
bootm 0x6400000