Beagle time

Boys,
Beagle gives you only 90 days warranty, so if you exceeded that period,
forget the idea of any free repairs.

Hi Rick,
I will find the webpage about the MLO and post the link.
Here is the link:
http://guillaume.segu.in/blog/hackens/337/getting-started-with-your-brand-new-beagleboard-xm/
Text after the 3rd picture:
“Next, make SURE that the first file you copy to the boot filesystem is MLO, otherwise it won’t be able to boot (the bootloader has to be the very first bytes of the filesystem).”

There is also information about power supply:
“you’ll have to power your BeagleBoard using an external 5V power supply. We used a 2 amp regulated DC power supply for that purpose. Since it could only deliver 4.5V and 6V outputs, we had to use a 5V/1amp voltage regulator.”

Final update. Joe’s three uSDs arrived. I tried all three. One got as far as lighting three of the LEDs once (but only once).

I downloaded and installed an SD-bootable version of Ubuntu 12.04 (I think?). With this, the script for making the SD cards failed, so I had to work through it by hand with fdisk. I was not able to write an image (the boot uSD was in my Creative Zen, the target uSD was in the computer’s SD reader, and the digital camera refused to connect to Ubuntu) so I copied off the MLO, U-Boot.bin and so on. I thought “sod Linux” and put in only enough to get RISC OS going. But it wasn’t having it. I tried writing some code to switch to SVC32 mode and bit-bash on the LEDs (I’m assuming flat memory mapping and no MMU at this state?) but that didn’t work either.

So…

Beagle and the various uSDs are back in the box. I’ll get it off to you (Joe) later in the week.

<sigh>

If/when I get a working Beagle back, I’m rather worried about how to deal with updates to RISC OS. I would like to have RISC OS on a uSD to boot from, but to have it otherwise left the hell alone… Hmmm…

Written as a separate message… What the hell is with Ubuntu? There’s no longer any bar across the top, but a list of icons down the left that seem to stay no matter what you do. LibreOffice, Firefox, setup… and where exactly might I find “terminal”? I had to go to the “other stuff” and type it into the filter. Then I found stuff wandered off the screen on to other screens when I dragged it around, the resize tried to be clever and got in the way. The work area seems to be treated as a unified ‘thing’ making a full-size window puts the menu and close icon “over there”, assuming it appeared at all (I had a bunch of folders open as the ‘x’ icon didn’t seem to show up anywhere).

All things considered, this Ubuntu looks quite nice, but it would appear to have been designed by art students rather than users… Is there an option to turn this crap off and go back to how it ought to be, or are we stuck it?

One might say RISC OS looks dated, but at least RISC OS doesn’t spring stuff like that on people! All of the progressions from RO2 onwards have made sense and built upon what came before…

Where exactly might I find “terminal”?

Ctrl + Alt + T not working?

You can disable unity but why use Ubuntu in the first place?

Ctrl + Alt + T not working?

Thanks for that, however it isn’t as if these shortcuts were visible when using the machine…

You can disable unity but why use Ubuntu in the first place?

Pendrive installer, top of the list.
Or, to put it another way, further down there are a dozen distributions (Fedora, Suse, etc) with no information or suggestion as to the positives and negatives of each one. It seemed to me that Ubuntu is popular, so…

Which would you have recommended, and why?

DistroWatch might possibly be of some interest.

One guy, very long member of KDE forum, was very apologetic, when he announced, that he had
enough of fixing bugs on SUSE and he quit, he recommended Ubuntu as the most stable, most
professional and most supported.
I totally agree, I used SUSE and had also many problems with hardware not being recognized,
system crashes and so on, never had single issue with Ubuntu, sorry once, when WiFi on my
laptop was off and the drivers were not loaded, I had to restart the system to get it working.

All things considered, this Ubuntu looks quite nice, but it would appear to have been designed by art students rather than users…

This is a common malaise in software these days, having infected installed software after creeping across from the new breed of websites where a “designer” has been given full reign without any thought being given to how usable it is, or how it’s going to come across to the average user. See Facebook timeline, new BBC homepage, Windows 8, etc. etc. The worst part of it is that the evil little prats – who think just because they took a course on Javascript they’re entitled not only to call themselves “web developers” but lecture other people on the best way to develop webs – invariably sound off on their own blogs about how they’ve created “an immersive user experience” and “a social-centric design language gamechanger” and “a pioneering adaptive paradigm of agile developmental dooberry” and other such phrases in a gruesome vomit-streak of bastardised and mangled parodies of the kind of ricockulous buzzword-filled managementese which makes you want to rip the stick out of their arse and jab it deep inside both their eye-sockets and ram it so far down inside their skull that it comes back out again at its original location.

As you can probably tell, it’s one of my pet peeves.

Happy Diamond Jubilee!

which makes you want to rip the stick out of their arse and jab it deep inside both their eye-sockets and ram it so far down inside their skull that it comes back out again at its original location.

For a while I’ve thought you were referring to chavs, I would never
suspect that your anger was somehow related to the Royal Family.

Martin – brilliant post. It’s like the living incarnation of Dilbert, isn’t it? My second best pet peeve is the SEO sites talking about how they have to constantly check the productivity levels of their web pages to ensure it is being fully monetized. I dunno about you, but the few times I’ve stumbled onto those places (with NoScript firmly engaged) it is just a load of crap about how much money they are making telling people how much money they are making… I guess it’s the stupid leading the stupid.

Joe – had a last-ditch attempt. Bought a 2GiB microSD and do not format it. Just used it out of the box, copied MLO then U-BOOT.BIN, then uEnv.txt, then cmos, and finally riscos. [don’t care about the Linuxy stuff, just wanna boot RISC OS]
It sat there, it’s one LED on, mocking me.

So, two uSDs of my own re-imaged several times in several ways (I’m writing this with a SD install of Ubuntu – thanks whoever gave me the Ctrl-Alt-T tip), plus the uSDs you sent me, plus the one I just bought. I think we can say it may well point to a hardware issue.

I took it to La Poste earlier, the girl there panicked awhile (I wonder if she even knew where Australia is?!) and after a time told me it’ll cost €30 to pop it into one of their envelopes and have it tracked and insured. Or it’ll cost me about €12 if I stick it in a box big enough to fit the sticky label on. It’ll be insured, but tracked a little less. I’ll go for that option and get it in the mail to you next week.
Oh… she said I have a bit of a weight allowance (2-3kg). Is there anything “French” you’d like me to pop into the parcel? If you don’t reply with any suggestions, I’ll pop in a pack of my favourite instant noodles (Oyakata soy flavour) plus a sachet of Sweet Sakura Tea (black, cherry).

Oh crap… Eight o’clock. That means time for work. Ho hum…

Hi Rick,
Don’t you dare to send any food, our customs
have got real Beagles and if they smell anything
they will delay the process and investigate, from my
own experience, it might take two or tree weeks.