openSUSE on CuBox (Day 8)

It works! I might have to swallow these words again later, but for now - it works! The submit request that I submitted to openSUSE:12.2:ARM:Contrib:Cubox was accepted - meaning that at some stage in the hopefully near future, the official openSUSE CuBox image will be updated to the one generated from the updated JeOS-cubox project.

What do I mean when I say it works? Well, obviously, there is no graphic support whatsoever - but you knew that anyway (on the upside, Bill Merriam is looking into this currently). If you generate a raw image from the openSUSE:12.2:ARM:Contrib:Cubox JeOS project (see my fourth post on openSUSE on CuBox to see how) and dd it onto a mini SD card, then it will boot without manual intervention. That doesn't mean you won't need a serial connection - you will, because the first thing you will have to do is use yast2-firstboot to configure the system (language, keyboard, timezone, root password etc). But you won't need workarounds like those described in my second post to get the kernel to boot.

After booting into yast2-firstboot, you configure the system. After the first reboot a different initrd is used than the one on the SD card. There was a bug here (in the uboot-setup.tgz) but that has now been fixed. What this means is that the first reboot now also works and gets you into a working openSUSE 12.2 system.

Once you are in the system, you can install additional software using zypper. For example, I needed the "screen" package - so I searched for it using zypper search screen. Then I installed it with zypper install screen. Worked fine. If you use YaST for system administration, you can install some useful additional modules like yast2-http-server, yast2-samba-server, yast2-runlevel. See what YaST modules are available with zypper search yast*.

If you meet bugs, which I hope you will (so we can fix them), I'm not sure where to report them yet. Probably on the Novell Bugzilla - but if you have a bug and you don't know what to do, I'd suggest you mention it on the #opensuse-arm irc channel on Freenode.

Have fun with openSUSE 12.2 on CuBox!