[Fox7799]

SOLVED: Bodhi Linux on the Genesi Smartbook was a big hit at LinuxFestNorthwest April 28-29, 2012. I had Bodhi booting off the SD card and all went well until near the end of the show when somebody took the SD card out when looking at the Genesi Smartbook which hosed the system. Today I have tried to boot both the SD Live and the Install versions of Bodhi on the Genesi Smartbook with no success. I have not been able to get past the original Gnome system login for a long time but that has not prevented me from booting into Bodhi Live on the SD card. The first successfully booting Bodhi SD card previously had Puppy Linux 5.2.8 on it and was formated as ext4. It worked first time with no problem. I have one Live SD card and one Install SD card. How should the SD cards be formated? Is there something I am missing here? Any clues would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Jeff]

Writing the Bodhi image to the SD card handles the formatting of the drive - the Bodhi image contains all the partition formatting needed.

~Jeff

[Fox7799]

 Jeff, on 01 May 2012 - 02:02 AM, said:

Writing the Bodhi image to the SD card handles the formatting of the drive - the Bodhi image contains all the partition formatting needed.

~Jeff

Why are the Bodhi SD cards not booting on the Genesi Smartbook? How do I get the SD cards to boot?

[Charles@Bodhi]

Removed by Jeff to prevent Mis-Information.

Enjoy,
Charles.

[Jeff]

Please disregard Charle's post - he was doing his best to help but ARM is completely different from x86 loading an SD card image.

There are instructions for writing the SD card image here. Simply dd the image to the SD card, pop it into the Genesi and turn it on - boots right up here without issue.

~Jeff

[Fox7799]

 Jeff, on 01 May 2012 - 06:00 PM, said:

There are instructions for writing the SD card image here. Simply dd the image to the SD card, pop it into the Genesi and turn it on - boots right up here without issue.

~Jeff

I have followed the instructions exactly and tried to boot the newer image file from Bodhi that is on one partition on the SD card plus the original 2 partition configuration but the SD cards will not boot on the Smartbook. The old 2 partition SD card setup gets me to a black screen but no further. The new single partition img setup gets ignored and the original Gnome system starts. How do I get the Bodhi SD installations to boot?

I can get to the command line on the original Gnome system that came with the Smartbook and connect to the internet on the terminal. I ran 'sudo apt-get update' but that didn't help. Is there any way to rescue the boot there? Booting in rescue mode does not work, only failsafe does. When I try startx, I get 'X: user not authorized to run the X server, aborting'

Should the SD card be formatted ext4, etc. or is a low level format from my Canon camera OK? Any clues would be appreciated. It seems to me that I should be able to see the SD card files on an Intel computer once they are installed. Correct? When I ran the 'sudo dd if=myfile.img of=/path/to/sdcard bs=1M' setup the file system was wiped out and the computer could not see it. I really want to get Bodhi running on this Genesi ARM processor Smartbook- preferably from the internal ssd hard drive. Thanks.

[Jeff]

 Fox7799, on 03 May 2012 - 05:26 PM, said:

'sudo dd if=myfile.img of=/path/to/sdcard bs=1M'

Did you run this command exactly or did you change the paths to the proper location of the SDcard and downloaded image?

~Jeff

[Fox7799]

 Jeff, on 03 May 2012 - 06:32 PM, said:

Did you run this command exactly or did you change the paths to the proper location of the SDcard and downloaded image?

~Jeff

Hi Jeff: I changed to the proper paths. When I first got the Genesi Smartbook in February 2012, I just copied the extracted Bodhi files into partitions 1 & 2 graphically with Puppy Linux 5.2.8 and the SD Bodhi boot worked the first time. Now I have tried to get many different Bodhi SD configurations to work, including the original 2 partition setup and the later Bodhi img on one partiton and nothing has worked. The 2 partition configuration gets me a black screen and that is all. The single partition img setup gets bypassed immediately and the old Gnome system boots instead. Looking at the SD cards on an Intel computer, I can see the files copied graphically but the dd setup creates a file that Intel cannot recognize.

The fact that setting up Bodhi on the Genesi Smartbook was so easy the first time I tried it and now I have spent hours trying to make it work, makes me think something needs to be corrected in the original Gnome system. As mentioned, I can only boot into safe mode on the Gnome system. Finding a way to get into recovery mode on the Gnome system might work or perhaps somebody has a better solution. Let me know. Thanks

[Jeff]

 Fox7799, on 04 May 2012 - 02:15 AM, said:

The fact that setting up Bodhi on the Genesi Smartbook was so easy the first time I tried it and now I have spent hours trying to make it work, makes me think something needs to be corrected in the original Gnome system. As mentioned, I can only boot into safe mode on the Gnome system. Finding a way to get into recovery mode on the Gnome system might work or perhaps somebody has a better solution. Let me know. Thanks

It might be worth asking over at the Genesi boards - but as far as I know the installed system you have should not affect the ability to boot from an SD card.

Something is coding wrong somewhere - the latest way to setup Bodhi is *far* easier/simpler than the first image. If all is well with the SD card/netbook all you do is run the DD command as opposed to having to manually create partitions and extract/copying files.

Do any of the Genesi provided image files boot properly on your device?

~Jeff

[Fox7799]

 Jeff, on 04 May 2012 - 04:07 AM, said:

It might be worth asking over at the Genesi boards - but as far as I know the installed system you have should not affect the ability to boot from an SD card.

Something is coding wrong somewhere - the latest way to setup Bodhi is *far* easier/simpler than the first image. If all is well with the SD card/netbook all you do is run the DD command as opposed to having to manually create partitions and extract/copying files.

Do any of the Genesi provided image files boot properly on your device?

~Jeff

Woohoo! I'm up and running with Bodhi Linux on my Genesi Smartbook internal ssd hard drive. It runs very fast and connects to wifi easily. The main difference this time was with the dd command, I had of=/dev/sdb instead of /dev/sdb1. The SD card was reformatted with my Canon camera and I could not read the resulting SD card img on an Intel computer. I did start from scratch, downloaded the zip file, checked the md5sum and extracted so I can't rule that out either. I heard this version had sound but I can't run c-span.org, video, etc. or a movie from my usb hard drive to test it. There doesn't seem to be a way to set the clock to my Pacific time so it is 2 hours off on Central time but otherwise correct.

Hopefully this will help others get Bodhi running on their Genesi Smartbooks. Bodhi runs a lot better on the Smartbook than the default Gnome Maverick system.

[Jeff]

 Fox7799, on 04 May 2012 - 09:00 PM, said:

Bodhi runs a lot better on the Smartbook than the default Gnome Maverick system.

Mhmm! I hope to get a new image out in within a couple of weeks of releasing our 2.0.0 alpha - the reason for this is I need an Ubuntu 12.04 based system to recompile the Genesi kernel properly.

Audio works fine here - I test it using a few MP3s I had laying around. Regarding changing time zone run:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

~Jeff