openSUSE 12.2 on CuBox (Day 1)

On November 6th (2012) Jos announced openSUSE 12.2 for ARM. Devices like the BeagleBoard and PandaBoard are "officially" supported. Some other boards, including the CuBox are supported as "best efforts".

To get started, I had a look at the Wiki pages over on the Solid Run site. I noticed that there were entries for Fedora, Ubuntu and Gentoo etc under "Linux Distributions", but no entry for openSUSE (except that the wiki pointed out that Solid Run donated hardware to openSUSE - which they did). I figured that I might as well get a wiki page for openSUSE started. I copied the basic download and installation information from http://en.opensuse.org/HCL:CuBox and added some more information on how to get started as an openSUSE ARM developer/packager.

My own CuBox has been in action as a NAS server for almost a year now. Up until tonight, it was running on Debian. I never had a single issue with it - it ran the bones of twelve months without crashing once. An occasional apt-get update and apt-get upgrade kept it up to date and never caused grief. Thus, it was with a certain degree of apprehension that I decided to give openSUSE a spin.

To get a linux distribution "installed" on a CuBox all you really need to do (for a supported distribution) is to copy the distribution image to a micro SD card, stick the card in the CuBox and reboot - preferably watching the whole process on a connected serial console - using e.g. screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200.

I first downloaded the appropriate openSUSE image (see http://en.opensuse.org/HCL:CuBox) and extracted it and dd'd it to the SD card as instructed. I stuck the SD card in the CuBox and started tracking the goings on of the bootloader through screen. I noticed pretty much immediately that not all was well in openSUSE land on CuBox. There were a series of nasty looking error messages, but it did look as though the bootloader finally found the linux kernel image, decompressed it and tried to boot from there. That's where nothing else worked. It is currently hanging at the "booting linux" statement.

Out of interest, I flashed my backup debian image to a different SD card and booted up on the CuBox. It booted as expected and got me into a root shell within seconds.

Thus, I anticipate a deal of debugging of the openSUSE image over the next couple of nights. Of the error message I did see, the ones relating to "kerneladdr" not defined and "ramdiskaddr" not defined seemed most serious.

You can have a look at the boot process here: http://pastebin.com/hHxiZJ5C