Thursday, January 29, 2015

pcDuino3 Nano - Debian / OpenMediaVault

This is another in the series documenting my setup of a new home server with the Linksprite pcDuino3 Nano.  A listing for the entire series can be found here.  More information on the pcDuino3 Nano can be found at Linksprite’s website and the pcDuino website.

Back in December when I started my pcDuino3 Nano Home Server Project I outlined how I was replacing my current home server which uses OpenMediaVault running on a Raspberry Pi.  In my pcDuino3 Nano – NAS or ??? post I talked about deciding to use something else as OMV neither OMV nor Debian the flavor of Linux that it runs on has a large installed base on the pcDuino.

As I moved forward with the project and started pulling together the software that I wanted to use for my home server I decided that while a home server could certainly be built from scratch the integration that you get with OMV was worth seeing if I could get it up and running on the pcDuino3 Nano.

Thanks to the excellent build scripts from Igor Pecovnik I have had some initial success and now have OMV running on the pcDuino3 Nano.  I plan to document the build and install process in future posts but I wanted to pass along what I have working in case anyone else is looking to run Debian on the pcDuino3 Nano.

Here are some links:

If you have any feedback please post it in the comments section below.  I will attempt to address any questions as quickly as possible.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is this image just like the recent ubuntu (including kernel)? Or is this only the root file system? In other words: if I boot this image, is the kernel also flashed?

digitalhack said...

Yes it is like the ubuntu image except it is Debian. It includes a 3.4.105 kernel and the Debian root file system.

digitalhack

Anonymous said...

Hi, Thank you! it is working good on pcduino and i would like to ask - can you compile also image with the mainline kernel 3.19.? I woul like tou use it with RT5572 wifi usb module as AP but in old kernel there is no support for it.

Anonymous said...

Hi digitalhack,
Can you please describe how to use the fork of yours to create image with igor script and apply your patch to it. Here is what i did:
I did git clone https://github.com/digitalhack/lib.git

then i did edit the README.md (clean the upper part and timezone) and make that file executable

I run the ./README.md and when the menu for choose board type show up there is no pcduino choice - so i choose bananapi or orange pi (they are simmilar to pcduino i tried both of them...)and then the "Jessie" distro and then the kernel 3.4.1xx and the script create images but when i try to run them on my pcduino they are not working they always stop on "waiting for root device /dev/mmcblk0p1...". What i do wrong?

digitalhack said...

Anonymous,

I expect that updates have been made to Igor Pecovnik’s scripts since I cloned this 4 months ago that for some reason are not compatible with the pcDuino3. You could try the more manual approach listed here: http://digitalhacksblog.blogspot.com/2015/02/pcduino3-nano-u-boot-kernel-rootfs-and.html and see if that works for you. I will try and get a chance in the next few days to run through the process and see if I can figure out why it isn't working. If I figure something out I will update the post.

digitalhack

Anonymous said...

digitathack thank you for answer i found what i did wrong. Iv run the README.md and it did clone igor´s git not yours and therefore i did not see the pcduino3 choises. So the correct way to use your fork is to do:
1. clone your git fork with git clone
2. copy the README.md file level up in the folder structure
3. make it executable
4. edit this file
5. run this file

I was doing it on linux mint 17.1 x64 but the resulting images were missing some things (it did not compile fex2bin bin2fex) and there was a lot of errors like "fatal error: sys/cdefs.h: No such file or directory" when compiling it.

So i did download the ubuntu 14lts x86 version a did it all again. This time i did not see errors like before but the resulting image was not able to boot properly it was not able to locate file pcduino3-nano.bin (i checked it if it exists a it was no created...) thats the problem for now. I dont know why it was not created. For now i copied it from your image (pcduino3nano.bin) and renamed it to pcduino3-nano.bin.

I also tried (many times) to create image with mainline kernel but i cannot download the source (links are dead :-(...)

Anonymous said...

digitathack thank you for answer i found what i did wrong. Iv run the README.md and it did clone igor´s git not yours and therefore i did not see the pcduino3 choises. So the correct way to use your fork is to do:
1. clone your git fork with git clone
2. copy the README.md file level up in the folder structure
3. make it executable
4. edit this file
5. run this file

I was doing it on linux mint 17.1 x64 but the resulting images were missing some things (it did not compile fex2bin bin2fex) and there was a lot of errors like "fatal error: sys/cdefs.h: No such file or directory" when compiling it.

So i did download the ubuntu 14lts x86 version a did it all again. This time i did not see errors like before but the resulting image was not able to boot properly it was not able to locate file pcduino3-nano.bin (i checked it if it exists a it was no created...) thats the problem for now. I dont know why it was not created. For now i copied it from your image (pcduino3nano.bin) and renamed it to pcduino3-nano.bin.

I also tried (many times) to create image with mainline kernel but i cannot download the source (links are dead :-(...)