As is typical of everything in the embedded world getting an OS up on the board presented a few challenges. I knew that I wanted to run debian on the board, I just had to figure out how to get it installed on to the microSD card. I picked up a 4GB class 4 card for the purposes of loading the OS and evaluating the board. Since there was no optical disk drive connected that ruled out the typical route of burning a debian install image. I couldn’t find a USB flash drive that I could format that was of sufficient size to load the install image on to. That left me with the option of putting the install image on a CF card using a USB CF card reader. Then, I booted the system with this drive and everything worked as though it would have with a USB flash drive. The only downside was the slow speed of the older CF card.

The install appeared to be going great, I got everything setup and I was ready for a reboot. So, I rebooted the system and I got nothing. Well technically I got the word “grub” printed on the screen and that was it. Thinking I had dorked something up I re-installed again, double checking everything. Same result! So, I decided to disconnect the USB CF card reader and try to boot up that way. Now I got even less! Just a flashing cursor. This told me that GRUB had some how gotten dorked up. So, I rewrote the installer image to CF card and booted up in rescue mode. I mounted my /boot partition by issuing mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /boot. I looked at /boot/grub/device.map and I saw my problem immediately. My device.map read:

(hd0)   /dev/sda
(hd1)   /dev/mmcblk0

It was thinking that /dev/sda was my first disk, and that mmcblk0 was my second. It installed the MBR on /dev/sda (which is what was screwing up my CF card after the install), but didn’t create a partition for /boot. Which is why I only got “GRUB” on my screen. So, I changed the device map to reflect the true state of my system, and re-did a grub-install specifying the device map. Rebooted the system and I got a grub menu as I expected but still couldn’t boot! The grub menu was still pointing to (hd1) for the kernel image. A quick edit of the boot parameters and I was booting.

After a bit of frustration everything is up and going. So, now it is time to get my packages installed and make sure I can run the embedded app on this board! I’ll post some more benchmarks at a later date. I am expecting good performance given what I saw with the 1.1GHz board.