As I’m upgrading the Linux I have in my Access Point, a.k.a. my home server, a.k.a. an SBC, I’ll just share it here in my blog.

Here’s what I need:

- SBC (Single Board Computer), wrap2c in my case
- Storage – I’m using 2GB CF card here
- Mini PCI wireless adapter – mine is CM9 (Atheros based)
- RS232 adapter
- USB – RS232 converter (optional, as my laptop doesnt have serial port)
- CF card reader
- and a camera to snap the photos in this post..

Instead of installing Debian or or Gentoo as what I described in my previous post, I’m gonna just install Voyage, a minimal Debian based distro customised for SBCs.

After downloading the tarball, extract it with sudo;

shakir@herugrim ~ $ sudo tar xvjf voyage-version.tar.bz2

Time to plug in the CF card, and let’s see where it is attached to:

shakir@herugrim ~ $ cat /proc/partitions
major minor  #blocks  name
   8     0  156290904 sda
   8     1   21494938 sda1
   8     2    8795587 sda2
   8     3    2939895 sda3
   8     4          1 sda4
   8     5    9775521 sda5
   8     6  113282316 sda6
   8    16    2014992 sdb
   8    17    2014721 sdb1

Here I can see my 2Gb CF is identified as /dev/sdb, and with this I run;

shakir@herugrim ~ $ cd voyage-version
shakir@herugrim ~/voyage-version $ less README

and follow the installation guide, which is in section 2 of the README

To see if things really work, I’m gonna need to make sure I can use my USB RS232 converter. Let’s plug it in and see what the kernel says;

usb 5-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
usb 5-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial
/build/buildd/linux-source-2.6.22-2.6.22/drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for generic
usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic
/build/buildd/linux-source-2.6.22-2.6.22/drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial Driver core
/build/buildd/linux-source-2.6.22-2.6.22/drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for pl2303
pl2303 5-1:1.0: pl2303 converter detected
usb 5-1: pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0
usbcore: registered new interface driver pl2303
/build/buildd/linux-source-2.6.22-2.6.22/drivers/usb/serial/pl2303.c: Prolific PL2303 USB to serial adaptor driver

What’s important from the long message is that the kernel has recognized the converter, and attach it to /dev/ttyUSB0. If your kernel doesn’t recognize the converter, fom the log you can see that it requires pl2303 module, so go re-compile your kernel to have it supported..

After everything is connected, lets run minicom;

shakir@herugrim ~ $ sudo minicom -s

Select the Serial port setup option and change it to this;

exit;

power on the board, and hope for the best

We’ve got the login prompt, mission accomplished