Snowball Board

Hi David,

Sorry to say, I’ve got nothing concrete to suggest, that problem didn’t occur for me.

My Micro SD card is class 4, 4GB.

I didn’t just ‘dd’ the image onto the card, either, I copied the partitioning from the image file, formatted the two partitions, and copied the files from the image onto the partitions. I expect you’d need Linux for that, though.

I just looked through my chat logs and I can’t find the commands I used to mount the image partitions loopback.

Hi Simon,
Many thanks for that valuable insight. I will investigate the formatting. Just a small question which no doubt demonstrates my ignorance – what do you mean by ‘image partitions loopback’?
I trust you now have a fully working system.

In Linux you can mount a file system image over a directory with the loopback option, it’s kind of like an image filesystem in RISC OS, just not as seamless.

sudo mount disc.img /tmp/disc -o loop

Would let you see (and modify) the contents of disc.img as if it were a real device mounted at /tmp/disc/.

The SD card images are a little more problematic, since they’re an image of a whole disc with a partition table and two filesystems, one FAT and one ext4. Each of those filesystems can be mounted using the offset argument, you just need to know the magic number…

mkdir fat ext4
sudo mount lt-snowball-x11-base_20120723-211-ubuntu-desktop.img fat/ -o loop,offset=$(( 512*63 ))
sudo mount lt-snowball-x11-base_20120723-211-ubuntu-desktop.img ext4/ -o loop,offset=$(( 512*106496 ))

The magic numbers come from here (start column, in 512 byte sectors:

bash-4.2$ fdisk lt-snowball-x11-base_20120723-211-ubuntu-desktop.img

Command (m for help): p

Disk lt-snowball-x11-base_20120723-211-ubuntu-desktop.img: 3221 MB, 3221225472 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 391 cylinders, total 6291456 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

                                               Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
lt-snowball-x11-base_20120723-211-ubuntu-desktop.img1   *          63      106494       53216    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
lt-snowball-x11-base_20120723-211-ubuntu-desktop.img2          106496     6291455     3092480   83  Linux

Command (m for help): q

Thanks Simon,

I’m not sure what the problem was but after several attempts to reflash the SD card and correcting my misstyping of blk1p2 I have got it to work. An HDMI display is up too! Have now updated and in the process of an upgrade, fingers are crossed.
The board runs surprisingly cool, even cooler than the pi.
— And it crashed on reboot! Should have quit while ahead.

I know the feeling well.

I get a couple of odd messages:

init: ureadahead main process (875) terminated with status 5

could mean it’s trying to mount something that doesn’t want to be mounted.

anc_status_control_put: Unable to configure ANC! (ret = -22)

No idea about that one!

On the plus side, my Mini-B plug to A socket cable seems to work OK. I had thought that the smaller plug should be a mini-A, since that’s the function the socket is to provide (i.e. the A end of an A-B cable with a powered hub on the other end which has a B connector). You live and learn. :)

Well, I have succeeded in getting Linaro 1207 up and running though I can’t do much with it except via the console. The desktop displays OK on boot but eventually disappears when the inactivity timer drops the output. I have connected the OTG port via a mini B plug to A socket adapter, thence to a powered hub and keyboard/mouse but the snowball does not respond. BTW the user LED flashes two quick flashes followed by a pause on a one second cycle.
Just a guess but ANC might be Advanced Network Controller.

Hi Guys!

Whats are the last experiences with this board? How well is it working?
Did you manage to upgrade the system to some decent version?
I’m thinking about buying a few pieces of this board for my car radio project and I found this thread while searching for more information.

Thanks.