Home Forums Getting Started Can someone make a better guide for Ubuntu? Reply To: Can someone make a better guide for Ubuntu?

#479
slab
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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/

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