I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from my howto about installing Ubuntu on the Cobalt Qube. Please feel free to leave comments on this post if you like.
Tags: cobalt, linux, qube, ubuntu
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on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 6:34 am and is filed under Free Software, qube.
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Comments (RSS)
March 26th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
i hear some have called you a sock puppet. don€™t worry, your qube was beautiful and will fund a new computer for your delight!
April 30th, 2007 at 10:47 am
I’ve tried to install ubuntu 7 on my Qube 3, but after the rom flash [all ok after the process] on the LCD I’ve only “Sun Cobalt” with a clock and a black cursor sliding like “knightrider car”.
No response to the ping…
I’ve destroied my Qube??
Thanks
Paolo
April 30th, 2007 at 11:17 am
Paolo,
Have you looked at the boot process in the serial console. That will tell you what’s happening. I suspect your Qube is fine and it’s ready to install an operating system.
April 30th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
I don’t have a null modem cable now…
But the lcd must respond at the use of buttons on the rear of Qube in this state?
May 1st, 2007 at 1:19 pm
Without a null modem cable it’s impossible to say what’s happening. You’ll have to get one. I think you’re putting the cart before the horse to wonder if you’ve destroyed your Qube without spending a few dollars on a serial cable.
May 2nd, 2007 at 2:31 pm
IT WORKS!!! It’s only in search of a DHCP server… this explain the sliding cursor.
Many thanks for the support!
Paolo
September 4th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Firt of all thanks a lot for your outstanding job! I don’t know Linux at all and I managed to have a RAQ 3 up and running just needing a couple of “educated guesses” following step by step the whole process indicated by you. I point them out just in case someone as dummy as myself in Linux could benefit of them:sudo apt-get install debootstrap nfs-user-serverdidn’t work for me prior to copy the sources.listand run apt-get updateI wanted to get the files from the cd and prior to issue the command sudo debootstrap dapper /nfsroot-x86 file:/media/cdrom0/ubuntu/ I had to mount the CD-ROM drive using mount /dev/hdc -t iso9660 /media/cdrom0I don’t know why but I didn’t managed to have more than the root and the swap partitionAt the beginning I wanted to use your “out of the box” kernel but “skipping” to the point you indicated I didn’t have a clue on how to proceed, so I went for compile a new onebeing such a “zero” on Linux I was shocked when a blue and gray window popped-up asking me to edit the kernel. I just exited having no clue and the installation luckily continuedduring this process I had a lots a wanrning (coming up from perl and/or python I cannot remember) asking to check the locales. Shall I check (how???) them and recompile the kernel?All the rest was perfect! Thanks a lot again for the great job and the opportunity you gave to lot of people like me to continue to us our beloved Cobalt boxes!
Ciao
Fabio
September 15th, 2007 at 8:56 am
I’ve just bought a Qube3 on eBay and, thanks to your HowTo, I probably saved several hours in installing Ubuntu.
I’d like to add one thing, I had one issue, after completing strictly your install guide, the Qube was refusing to boot the new kernel a
September 15th, 2007 at 9:20 am
I€™ve just bought a Qube3 on eBay and, thanks to your HowTo, I probably saved several hours in installing Ubuntu.
I€™d like to add one thing, I had one issue, after completing strictly your install guide, the Qube was refusing to boot the new kernel and kept using the one in ROM. After several hours and retries, I realized that the issue wasn’t coming from the new kernel but from the cmos settings. I guess the former owner was issue the Qube with 2 disks in mirroring, the boot device and root device were set to ‘md1′ instead of ‘hda1′, this is why the Qube couldn’t even find my new kernel. I put back the correct value, rebooted and (yeepee!!) managed to get my Ubuntu 6.06 login prompt.
For those who might have the same issue, here are the commands to check and change those values.
Enter ROM mode by pressing when asked on the console, you should get this prompt:
Cobalt:Main Menu> boot
Cobalt:Boot Menu> read_boot_dev
md1
Cobalt:Boot Menu> set_boot_dev hda1
Boot device is set to 0×0301
Cobalt:Boot Menu> read_root_dev
md1
Cobalt:Boot Menu> set_root_dev hda1
Root device is set to 0×0301
Cobalt:Boot Menu> read_boot_type
From disk
Cobalt:Boot Menu> reboot
Rebooting - please wait……….
The Qube will now try to load your new kernel!!!
Thanks again for sharing your work,
Cheers,
Fabrice
October 18th, 2007 at 1:19 am
I’m afraid I’ve fallen at the first hurdle. There’s no inittab in 7.10!
February 9th, 2008 at 12:25 am
I’ve done all steps shown in the howto and installed the prebuilt kernel with:
dpkg -i kernel *
I symlinked vmlinux.bz2 with the vmllinuz file provied by the installer after a reboot the qube stops working with the following output (via serial console)
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
VFS: Mounted root (ext3 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 100k freed
BOOTLOADER: Mapping in physical locations
BOOTLOADER: load_addr=0xc2004000 ret_data=0xc2205cc4
BOOTLOADER: opening “/boot/vmlinux.bz2″
BOOTLOADER: reading “/boot/vmlinux.bz2″
BOOTLOADER: read 1312774bytes
BOOTLOADER: unmounting /
BOOTLOADER: calling reboot notifiers
md: stopping all md devices.
flushing ide devices: hda
BOOTLOADER: mapping 22M-32M for ride home
BOOTLOADER: disabling interrupts
BOOTLOADER: flushing cache
BOOTLOADER: Leap of faith!
Back in ramcode: done
Second stage kernel: Decompressing -Error bunzip2ing kernel. Trying gunzip.
ERROR: unknown compression method
ERROR: internal error, invalid method
Error gunziping kernel. Giving up.
command line: ‘console=ttyS0,115200 debug ip=off ‘
booting kernel…
Any ideas?
March 20th, 2008 at 4:31 am
Jim -
Hey, thanks for the guide on how to configure ubuntu on the Qube 3. Just a quick question - I configured a ubuntu NFS server using a LiveCD and then followed pretty much all of the instructions - except that right after I pick the network boot option I see the Qube3 come in for the DHCP lease (good) and then try for the NFS mount (also good), but for some reason it immediately ran into a kernel panic.
Any idea what I should look into for troubleshooting?
March 22nd, 2008 at 1:22 pm
….um. Never mind. Turns out that running an nfs user server off a Ubuntu Dapper LiveCD does not and will not work.
BTW, note that the chroot step of the procedure assumes that the NFS server is running on x86 hardware. If you run it on SPARC/PPC/Itanium the chroot for apt-get will definitely not work. Just a friendly FYI.
May 7th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Jim, your instructions combined with Tim Wiley’s kernel build instructions worked great! I also used upgrade-manager to upgrade to 8.04 and it worked fan-tastic!! I’m now running 8.04 on my RAQ3 and I’m hoping to clone the drive into my RAQ3i as well. Thanks very much!!!