I am pleased to announce that I have finished creating a minimal headless Ubuntu 10.10 SD card image for the Efika MX smarttop.

This SD card contains a base install of Ubuntu 10.10 with the text version of update manager and aptitude. it requires no screen or keyboard to get running.

You simply put the image onto an SD card, place it into the smarttop, plug in an ethernet cable and power on.

After a while the LED will blink red indicating that it is ready to install. ssh to 192.168.93.42 using the account and password of oem and you will get a menu with 3 options:

i -- install to internal SSD
r -- discard installer and run from SD card
s -- drop to a shell.
if you choose to install to SSD it will do so and shut down.
just remove the card and power on and the light will be flashing yellow. connect to the same account/ip and choose the r option and you will be asked a few questions about your network setup, timezone and the initial user account.

at the end of this the machine will reboot and will no longer have any flashing on the LED. log into the IP/account you set up and you are good to go with no traces of the installer left on the system.

The same setup process will happen if you choose r while booted from the SD card. this process will cause the installer system and archives to be deleted from the SD card and ask the same questions about network and initial user. at the end you will have a bootable SD card that looks the same as the install to SSD would (except its kernel and fstab are set up to run from sd card)

I will likely have this uploaded later today or early tomorrow. I'm waiting to see if a new kernel comes out publicly today.

This is my own personal project and not supported directly by Genesi.

You will be able to find the image when it is ready at http://steubentech.com/~talon/Efika-MX I will reply to this post when I have the upload finished.

It is now available for download at http://steubentech.com/~talon/Efika-MX/headless/

I don't have any instructions other than what was posted in this thread. you can simply uncompress and dd the image to a 4GB SD card.

I will post some tar files and extra instructions later.

audio should work out of the box. I have pulse aduio installed and set up to run as a system wide server. aumix is also installed.

when testing it here all I needed to install after setup was mplayer and sshfs to be able to play my mp3s on my headless Efika.

Enjoy.

Extra note:
unlike setting up a linksys router or something like that
this machine will not give out addresses over dhcp. you will have to add a static IP in the 192.168.93.x range to one of your ethernet interfaces so you can connect to it at 192.168.93.42 for the initial setup.

Cool! Thank you for this work, I'm downloading right now )

Let me know what you think once you've tried it out.

I have posted tar archives and a README with md5 checksums of each file and generic instructions on how to use the tar files to create your own sd card if it happens to be a different size than the one I imaged.

Thanks for tars. I will definitely try it this week, when some spare time be available.

Why configure a weird IP address? Let it fetch one from DHCP.

I can understand why it might be better to have a static IP to SSH to, but at the point you are willing to SSH into a system that's headless to install something like a server, router or compiler environment (the three most common things I guess) - you are perfectly capable of looking at your DHCP leases table on whatever box gave out the lease.

That way it just integrates into peoples' networks without having to reconfigure a different system to try and get network access to it. When it reboots into the SSD once it's installed, it will probably get the same IP address from the lease, and then.. well, configuring /etc/network/interfaces and rebooting again isn't such a hardship.

Why triple the work by doing this on the PC, then inside the Efika, then unconfiguring the PC? :)

I'd also say - since you specifically mentioned it - aptitude is absolutely useless on Ubuntu, too. There is nothing this tool does that you can't do in plenty of other ways. You can get back a couple hundred kilobytes of disk space. The only reason we ship it in the "oem" configuration is because Ubiquity depends on debian-installer which ultimately somewhere depends on it. As soon as you get past that point it gets autoremoved at the first opportunity. You could save a couple hundred kb of disk space.

Otherwise, neat.

The main reason for not using DHCP is because I don't see the MAC address printed on the hardware anywhere. so it could be rather hard if I've got a lot of devices to find the smarttop without knowing that mac address. I could easily modify it to do dhcp though (or anyone could just change the ifconfig line in the init script to a dhclient command instead)

as far as aptitude goes its just a matter of personal preference I use both aptitude and apt-get on a regular basis. I removed all of the ubiquity stuff because it did not help me with first time setup over ssh at all. it refuses to run inside an SSH session and only wants to take over the console which is useless in this case. My shell script does pretty much everything I wanted ubiquity to do anyway.

The strange IP range of 192.168.93.x just happens to be what my home network is set to, but I also figured its not likely to be anyone else's private address range.

I've had a few dumb devices that I had to set up exactly the same way (by adding it's IP range to one of my interfaces and talking to it) and I modeled things after that.

By the way if anyone does want to change the setup to use dhcp you need to edit /etc/rc2.d/S99oemrc and make it use dhclient instead of ifconfig.

you will want to create a new root.tar.xz with those changes too. (root.tar.xz is just a copy of the installer root but has an fstab meant for mounting the internal SSD disk)

you can find that fstab in /home/oem) I just copy the alternate fstab to /etc/fstab on the SD card's root and make a new root.tar.xz, put back the old fstab and copy the new root.tar.xz into /home/oem and you should be all set.

What I could do though now that I'm thinking about it is run dhclient in my init script *AND* add the static IP to that interface. that way you get an IP even if you don't get a lease and if you cant find the DHCP address you still have an IP you can use.

It does not seem to boot here :-( My smarttop always boots to the SSD and not the SD card.

UPDATE: it's my old TO2 smarttop with a heavily changed u-boot environment. I guess, I need to reset and update it first. It does not use yet boot.scr...

Yeah it totally depends on boot.scr. I don't even think the Genesi installer image I based it off of would boot without the new firmware that uses the boot.scr exclusively.

Oops. In theory http://www.powerdeveloper.org/asset/by-id/116 should update the old TO2 smarttop too. In practice I get:



I put type_id.bin there manually, but no luck...

Might be useful to start a new thread about that or get a hold of Matt. I've only tested this stuff on my own smarttop which was shipped with the current firmware. if the firmware updater doesn't work on your TO2 I'm sure someone at genesi can help you fix that.

Done: http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... 4501#14501

What a nice surprise: installation worked fine using the serial port! So I did not have to play with 192.168.93.0/24 or edit scripts.

Thanks!