Reply To: Can someone make a better guide for Ubuntu?

[slab]

The guide that’s up now wants you to format a SD card with a single ext4 partition, but the default u-boot environment is set up for (and works automatically!) if you have a SD card with:
– The first partition being a FAT32 partition, on which you put Image and the dtb.
– The second partition being an ext4 with your root filesystem.

Grab:
– http://espressobin.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/kernel.zip
– http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/16.04.2/release/ubuntu-16.04.2-server-arm64.iso

Then (assuming that your SD card reader enumerates the card as /dev/sde as it did on my machine)
– Use cfdisk and create a smallish (100M is more than enough) FAT32 partition, then allocate the rest to be Linux.
– sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sde1
– sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sde2
– sudo mkdir -p /mnt/sde1 /mnt/sde2 /mnt/iso
– sudo mount /dev/sde1 /mnt/sde1
– sudo mount /dev/sde2 /mnt/sde2
– sudo mount -o loop ubuntu-16.04.2-server-arm64.iso /mnt/iso
– sudo unsquashfs -f -d /mnt/sde2 /mnt/iso/install/filesystem.squashfs
You should apply the fixups that the wiki recommends:
edit /mnt/sde2/etc/passwd and remove the x in in root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash so root can log in.
edit /mnt/sde2/etc/securetty and add ttyMV0
– unzip kernel.zip
– sudo mv kernel/armada-3720-community.dtb /mnt/sde1
– sudo mv kernel/Image /mnt/sde1
– sudo umount /dev/sde1
– sudo umount /dev/sde2

At this point, you should be able to insert the SD card into your EspressoBin and it should Just Work with the default environment.
If you’ve mucked around with it, you’ll need to reset it. At the u-boot prompt (‘Marvell>>‘)
– setenv bootcmd 'run get_images; run set_bootargs; booti $kernel_addr $ramfs_addr $fdt_addr'
– saveenv

You should also be aware of this kernel panic issue that you’ll hit with the Ubuntu image: http://espressobin.net/forums/topic/crash-after-booting-for-about-a-minute/