First attempt at F12 install on SD card

So, as you may already have guessed just by the title of the blog post, I was unsuccessful at getting things to work the way I was hoping :( However, on a positive note, I learned a few things along the way.

I first wanted to try getting Fedora 12 on an SD card. Why? well assuming you haven't read my previous blog posts, my goal is to get F12 working on a SheevaPlug.

This is what I did:

1. I plugged an ethernet cable into the SheevaPlug and connected it to my network.

2. I checked the DHCP table on my router to find out the IP that was assigned to the SheevaPlug (192.168.15.109)

3. SSH root@192.168.15.109

4. I inserted the SD card into the SheevaPlug's card reader slot

At this point, I decided to use the steps found HERE to help me install F12 on the SD card. The only difference is the instructions on this page use an external media card reader (a usb based one) attached to a separate Linux machine instead of using the actual Sheevaplug to prep the SD card.

This difference is good to know when following Steps 2-5 (on the linked page). The instructions show that the device comes up as /dev/sdc. However in my case the device came up as mmc1.

I hit a snag at STEP 6 (on the linked page). wget didn't seem to be installed so I decided to install it. However, (yea that's right, just when things seem so simple lol) I had to configure the device's network settins (specifically the default gateway).

COMMAND: route add default gw 192.168.15.109

Then I added the name server to /etc/resolv.conf.

Finally, I could run apt-get install wget. Moving along with the f12 installation everything went smoothly (so I thought). I restarted the device, and noticed it was taking longer to boot up. While the boot up process was happening I was getting the following error messages:

Empty flash at 0x08b59008 ends at 0x08b59800
Empty flash at 0x08e5da90 ends at 0x08e5e000
Empty flash at 0x11e3606c ends at 0x11e36800
Empty flash at 0x1cd3b804 ends at 0x1cd3c000

Eventually the prompt to log-in came up and I knew at that point things didn't work the way they were suppose to. I logged into the SheevaPlug and ran dmesg | tail and this is what I got:

root@debian:~# dmesg | tail
Empty flash at 0x0881d338 ends at 0x0881d800
Empty flash at 0x08b59008 ends at 0x08b59800
Empty flash at 0x08e5da90 ends at 0x08e5e000
Empty flash at 0x11e3606c ends at 0x11e36800
Empty flash at 0x1cd3b804 ends at 0x1cd3c000
VFS: Mounted root (jffs2 filesystem).
Freeing init memory: 104K
JFFS2 notice: (259) check_node_data: wrong data CRC in data node at 0x08b59000: read 0x65d2282d, calculated 0xc228ad7.
JFFS2 notice: (385) check_node_data: wrong data CRC in data node at 0x1ba59000: read 0x7c0f9814, calculated 0xa9f38ad5.
fat: exports duplicate symbol fat_add_entries (owned by kernel)

As of right now, I am stuck at that. As soon as I get a clue on what went wrong I will post an update.