Beagle time

I have a Beagle xM and no widget, settings are loaded from a file prior to boot.

After boot, the system time is January 1970.

Is this normal behaviour, or is something misconfigured?

Best wishes,

Rick.

You need a battery for the RTCC.

Advert mode ON
Available from: http://www.cjemicros.co.uk/micros/individual/newprodpages/prodinfo.php?prodcode=VAR-BBBXM

Or save yourself the hassle and install NetTime.

Or save yourself the hassle and install NetTime.

Assuming you have a working network setup.

That’s the point – my Beagle has never been near a network. It isn’t really viable until WiFi is an option. Though, in the future, I might run WebJames and jack it into my Livebox.

I recall Angstrom gave a more valid date than 1970. So I booted up into Linux and it spewed numbers across the screen, followed by a message about kernel panic and init-something or other. After a few moments it all went dark. Well, I thought, it at least has the brains to try to reboot itself, let it go back into RISC OS.

But no.

The Beagle was dead. Like a dodo. Power up, the hub light flickers and the power light comes on. Nothing more.

I hooked it to my RiscPC and once or twice some extra LEDs came on (so something was happening), but while the lead fit I think it was a crossover cable so nothing appeared on screen.

I went to make a new SD image (the original chkdsk’d okay) and it failed during 7zip decompression with a data error.

By now I’d wasted several hours of a nice afternoon. I tried booting up the Beagle again (you know, always an optimist) and RISC OS appeared in, like, ten seconds flat.

What the bleep?

How does a device go from doing nothing when you poke the reset button to working apparently fine with no user intervention? I know this is an old building (14th century or somesuch) but I’d really prefer if the assorted collection of ghosts stuck to old-school tactics like going “wooooo!” at the cats.

I guess I’ll need to get either a battery or a widget (I think, ultimately, the widget would be the most useful option). I wonder if CJE could source some cheap DVI-input LCD displays. Doesn’t need to be big, it’s a shame those dopey little photo-frame jobbies can’t take a digital input.

Either way, I’m not much of a fan of Unix (arcane cumbersome command line abuse, case sensitive filenames, takes forever to boot (my PVR boots in, like 2-3 minutes) so this bizarre debacle has just piled on more reasons to think Unix sucks. Even if I’ve got Napoleon’s ghost rampaging around the SRAM, I’m still going to say it was Unix’s fault. It makes me feel a little better ‘cos as a geek who likes logic, “phase of the moon” explanations don’t really do it for me.

Best wishes,

Rick.

Whilst the widget will save CMOS settings, it won’t maintain the clock – the battery is needed for this.

That’s the point – my Beagle has never been near a network. It isn’t really viable until WiFi is an option.

Well, you could of course get an ethernet-WiFi bridge if desperate ;-)
Bit overkill for setting the correct time but non networked computers are so 1980.
I’d let you have my battery though, just drop me a line if you want me to send it to your place.

Create a program to run on startup :-
The year/month doesn’t change too quickly so that could be saved.
So that leaves the date an hour min to enter each time the machine startsup.
ie enter [24 1200] job done.

Your experience of Linux is not typical.

I’ve got a Linux (Ubuntu 12.04) desktop behind me here that boots up in a very respectable time. I’ve got a Linux notebook (Ubuntu 11.04) downstairs that boots up even faster. I have never known Windows boot anyhere near as fast as either of them – and they are not by any means high spec hardware.

And you shouldn’t need to do much command line fiddling, if any at all. My wife is the prime user of the notebook, and she wouldn’t have a clue what to do at a command prompt.

And you shouldn’t need to do much command line fiddling, if any at all.

I might venture to suggest that your experience of Linux is the one which is not typical.

To take just one example from my experience: have you tried to upgrade to a new version of the OS yet?

patric – the things that need to be are networked, but having wires is so 1990s. ;-)
So, even with a widget you need a battery? Hmm, the timestamp is the important thing (kinda mucks up Make jobs otherwise!), so I’d like to take you up on your offer. This forum doesn’t seem to support PMing or profiles, so where should I contact you? [you can spam-trap it, write at etc]

Dave – I have a LiveCD of Ubuntu on an SD for my eeePC. It neither supports nor recognises my printer. It could, if I rip out the print subsystem and put in a different one. Downloaded and printed, it came to eleven pages of gibberish and a healthy abuse of apt-get. Oh, add another six pages if I want a hope of using the scanner, plus a further three if I think I’ll be using both without, like, rebooting or something in between.
I chucked the printouts in the bin and rebooted to Windows.

Yes, Linux can boot quickly. My open source firmware router comes up in about ten seconds. My Livebox takes four minutes. My PVR takes two and a bit. Pop in a serial lead, you can see the boot happening…checking this, checking that. BogoMIPS, blah blah. Why, on an embedded device, are we wasting time doing this stuff? It isn’t going to change. I bet so much stuff can be hardwired to get equipment to boot quickly. But it isn’t, so it’s still > 1 minute between pressing the button on an Android phone and having a UI to interact with… And I wouldn’t use Windows as the benchmark for anything!

How does a device go from doing nothing when you poke the reset button to working apparently fine with no user intervention?

I don’t recall ever seeing my Beagle Xm resetting itself after pressing the reset button,
I always had to disconnect the power to reboot.
There is an Always Innovating Beagleboard xM image, which has got 4 operating system on 1 micro SD
more about it here:
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/beagleboard/
and
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/wiki/index.php/Beagleboard
Maybe some very nice soul would be able to modify the original image and add/replace
something on it in order to have RISC OS as an extra option.
There is Android, Ubuntu, AI OS and Google Chromium.
To run Chromium you have to have internet access so maybe RISC OS would go here
or just add it as the “5th element”.
You have to create a custom ai-initramfs.cmd to start either Ubuntu or preferably
AI OS because there are some keyboard and mouse limitation at the boot process,
you would need original AI’s $99 Smart keyboard to have everything working.
When you boot to AI OS, you can change operating systems whenever you like it.

I don’t recall ever seeing my Beagle Xm resetting itself after pressing the reset button,

Never? It’s wired to hardware reset, isn’t it?

I always had to disconnect the power to reboot.

Have you tried:
SYS "OS_Reset"
?
Or, Shift-Ctrl-F12 and press Enter when it has the “Restart” button.
Or (annoyingly, must patch it to not do this) ^Break. [mmm, where’s a Gerph when you need one?]

All of these reset the Beagle xM, right back to the colour bars (it’s a TV-out thing, dunno what you see on DVI at reset).

I was looking for info on what might have caused my particular quirk. I mean, the board may work flawlessly from now until I die but I’ll lose sleep over it ‘cos my brain is like that. I’ve determined the boot sequence starts with the power LED, and the hub LED flashes. I don’t know if this is automatic or if it is done by the internal boot loader. After this point, the two user LEDs come on, I presume MLO or whatever has loaded by this point, and it is shortly followed by all of the other LEDs, guessing that this is done by U-Boot. I might be able to confirm more if I had a serial connection that worked, but for some totally obscure reason they wired it up oddly. I think I’ll need to see if I can find an old computer-modem lead (and hope I don’t need a gender changer). Actually I might just look at the schematic, if it’s a three-wire jobbie I may have enough bits around to do it from scraps.

Anyway, I came across this appalling quality video which would appear to be showing a problem with the Beagle (original) not starting correctly.

Best wishes,

Rick.

Okay, just for giggles…

Booting Angstrom as supplied on the microSD card. 1 minute 24.3 seconds. (including a 10 second auto-login delay, as I’m timing reset-to-usable-UI).

Booting RISC OS. Twenty five seconds (exactly).

We’re in colourbars (s-video) for the first 15 seconds (and then the init module list appears), so not sure how much is actually going on there – if it is RISC OS or U-Boot for a while. There may even be a “wait to see if user key is pressed” delay that can be dropped.

It is evident that RISC OS is probing for a keyboard, presumably to handle CMOS resets and the like. I bet if we built a version of RISC OS without that we could shave some time off of that.

Do we have any takers for beating 25 seconds? ;-)

[and no, the <3 second boot doesn’t count at it was highly optimised specifically for the device…]

Best wishes,

Rick.

To take just one example from my experience: have you tried to upgrade to a new version of the OS yet?

Yes, from 11.04 to 11.10, then to 12.04. Those upgrades were performed with absolutely no command line intervention. I didn’t know there was any other way.

This forum doesn’t seem to support PMing or profiles, so where should I contact you?

welcome at Acorn Antiques o_O
Try tide AT sdf Hyphen eu DOT org

Actually I might just look at the schematic, if it’s a three-wire jobbie I may have enough bits around to do it from scraps.

Hi Rick,
you need straight through male to female cable.
http://www.camiresearch.com/Data_Com_Basics/New_Cable_pdfs/1.pdf

Joe, the way I assume AI’s OS switcher works is that it keeps the kernel running, but switches userland underneath it. In other words you share a Linux kernel between all the OSes (Android and ChromeOS having Linux kernels, if not a GNU userland). RISC OS is so fundamentally different that it needs full access to the hardware – switching to a ‘RISC OS userland’ with a Linux kernel makes no sense. The nearest you’d come is a version of RPCEmu optimised for ARM running under a Linux kernel, but that would be quite different from running RISC OS natively.

Thanks Theo,
I didn’t think of that, I’ve thought that AI was ready to accept any operating system,
they even provided some extra slots for implementing another 2 operating systems.

switching to a ‘RISC OS userland’ with a Linux kernel makes no sense.

AI’s Grégoire Gentil was kind enough to reply to my emails to him on this last March. ISTR already having forwarded things on to ROOL and possibly Jeffrey at the time. So no new info, but for the record, the reply included:

I’m not a coder but I understand that RISC OS does not use the Linux kernel. Therefore its inclusion would complicate the multi-OS system. What are your thoughts on this?

Difficult. I would need to investigate more.

What worries me is that you are saying [above] that it’s not on the linux kernel. That complexifies everything.

Nyan cat got your tongue Rick? Battery is ready to go.

Nyan cat got your tongue Rick? Battery is ready to go.

Patric, Rick stays away from his computer on the weekends, he enjoys short excursions,
check his B.LOG at:
www.heyrick.co.uk or www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=00000000

Rick,
here is how to install the battery p. 133:
http://beagleboard.org/static/BBxMSRM_latest.pdf

You have to remove one of the resistors from the board..

Patric, Rick stays away from his computer on the weekends.

Okay, I don’t ckeck mail that often these days when not expecting something. Thought it got lost.
Otherwise send me a direct @TynHau

patric – emailed you.

Sorry, I finish work at 3-4am on Friday, so I’m pretty much zonked by then and don’t tend to want to do anything too taxing on Saturday. Not that this Saturday was much use, got everything ready to enjoy the madness that is Eurovision, only to be granted instead to an award-winning thunderstorm. It isn’t often it rains hard enough to kill satellite reception, but yesterday it started around 9pm and carried on intermittently until sunrise.

Additionally, I decided that I have not been reading enough. I mean, I was the kid that finished Chocky and The Crysalids when the other kids in school had books with big words on one page and a picture on the other (“Elf light and candle light” or some rubbish like that). The teacher that liked to call me a retard was not at all amused when she caught me reading “The War Of The Worlds”, so I laid out the story thus far. Anyway, excepting manga and PDFs of stuff and magazines, I’ve not really read for a couple of years. So through last week I finished the first Haruhi Suzumiya novel, and today I’ve read about a third of the second. I have five (or is it six?), I’m actually quite looking forward to progressing the story beyond where KyoAni took it in the TV series/film.

Nyan cat sat out with me enjoying the sun as I read. There was a brief moment where she attempted to merge with me over a disagreement of who “owns” the plastic chair. So I explained to her that as purchaser of the food, she can damn well sit in the grass and stop complaining. Off she ambled, flicking her tail. Pffft, too much catitude, that one…

Tried making a replacement Angstrom boot microSD earlier. Got a heap of device I/O errors and stuff about buffers and write failures when trying to boot from it [it’s a Verbatim 4GiB class 4; demo img passes MD5 check, written with W32DiskWriter]. This pile of error messages is followed by a kernel panic. Yay.
My Beagle is now back to its silly-buggers mode of powering up with only the power LED on. It seems whenever Linux kernel-panics, it screws up something that stops the hardware booting up for a while (perhaps poking crap into the helper chip, the… uh… 65950? it’s a guess…). So I guess it is now decided, I’ll just run RISC OS on the thing and ignore everything else.

Best wishes,

Rick.