Running Debian on Beagle Board

Hello,

Hi

My name is Sofia. I am trying to run Debian on BeagleBoard. I am following
your instructions on BeagleBoardDebian - eLinux.org. I was able to
install debian on my sd card with foll partitions:

sdb1-- fat32 /
sdb2--ext3
sdb3--extended
sdb5--swap swap

To install debian on sd card, I used the foll command:

sudo qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb -kernel vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-versatile
-initrd initrd.gz -m 256 -hda /dev/sdb -append "root=/dev/ram mem=256M"

This works fine and debian is installed with desktop. It says installed
successfully.

Then I try to run debian on QEMU using foll command:
sudo qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb -kernel vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-versatile -m
256 -hda /dev/sdb -append "root=/dev/sda2 mem=256M"

This gives me kernel panic saying 'kernel panic ---unable to mount root fs
on unknown block(0,0)

was this /dev/mtblock? by chance.. you can ignore that error...
Looking at some of my older scripts that should just work, although i
try to use qemu as minimal as possible (it's so slow!) Make sure
fdisk -l shows /dev/sdb and that your boot in qemu shows /dev/sda2
mounted, it may have tried /dev/sda5

I skip the running from QEMU section and then do kernel preparation and then
I try to boot the beagle board. The beagleboard fails to start X server, so
there is
no desktop. I really need help on this. Please suggest.

Couple things to check, drop down to console and make sure you have
fbdev installed.

Ubuntu/Mojo: sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-fbdev

and add this to your xorg.conf to force it..

Section "Device"
  Identifier "Configured Video Device"
  Option "UseFBDev" "true"
  Driver "fbdev"
EndSection

Which reminds me i really need to make a debian package for the omapfb
in angstrom available for debian/mojo users.

Note: Since Debian Lenny is compiled with armv4t, if you really want
to use a desktop on the beagleboard you should use the mojo handhelds
armv5/armv6 builds. The mojo guys used a simple x11 benchmark that
showed 15-20% performance increase in framebuffer graphics between
armv5 and armv6...