Hi, I'm back - some of you with long memories may recall that I tried to get
started with astlinux two years ago and gave up. (I couldn't get the
configuration to "stick" and had problems writing to my CF card and ran out
of time.)
Now I've lost the use of my ISDN PBX (due to termination of the ISDN
service), my net4801 is gathering dust, I've bought a new CF card and
astlinux 0.6.2 has been released, so it's time to have another try.
My first problem was copying the image to the CF card. I couldn't get
physdiskwrite to work at all (using Vista Home Premium), even in
"administrator" mode, using the "-u" option etc. I get "write error" after
65536 bytes and there's nothing on the card, although the name has changed
to RUNNIX. After that I couldn't do anything with the card in Windows until
I used the CLEAN command "diskpart" and reformatted the card. Is it supposed
to be formatted before physdiskwrite is used, or not? I couldn't find any
documentation about this. If so, what format should I use? Simple FAT?
I gave up on that and installed Ubuntu ("wubi"-style) and tried using the DD
command. I had trouble working out which of the many /dev/sdx devices it was
(very nerve-wracking - I once trashed my hard disk trying to install linux).
The card is mounted as /media/[card name] but DD wouldn't accept that.
Unplugging the card didn't make any of the /dev/sdx devices disappear as I
expected. I tried guessing /sdb and DD appeared to complete (suspiciously
quickly) but nothing had happened. I googled around and found that you need
to login as root, tried that but Ubuntu wouldn't let me. Googled again and
found you need to use sudo, tried that and it just seemed to hang (no disc
activity, nothing). Eventually I found that it will complete if you leave it
alone for 15 mins and the contents of the card look reasonable. Yay!
Put the card in the 4801, dug out an old serial cable, discovered Vista
doesn't come with Hyperterm and had to download teraterm, fired it up and
got a promising-looking boot sequence that ends with
Loading runnix....................
Loading runnix.img....................
Ready.
Now what do I do? The instructions say "log in as root" but there's no
response to my keypresses.
I tried rebooting and entering Ctrl-P to enter the Monitor mode and that all
works. And the red error light goes off (just the green power light remains
on) when I let it continue to boot.
I tried plugging in a flash stick but nothing happened. I also tried
browsing to it but it doesn't seem to have acquired an IP address.
I've spent all day on this and haven't even got to first base. Again. :-(
--
Phil McKerracher
www.mckerracher.net
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Astlinux-users mailing list
Astlinux-users@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/astlinux-users
Donations to support AstLinux are graciously accepted via PayPal to
pay...@krisk.org.
