Installing Arch Linux on Wandboard

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 01 Jan 2015 06:22:18 GMT  <== Computers ==> 

I have a dual-core Wandboard on which I've been running a Debian install a coworker built. I decided to try Arch Linux on it, for yuks, and to see if it fixed a multi-core thread switching bug I recently discovered in Clozure Common Lisp (CCL).

I followed the installation instructions, but when I booted up the Wandboard, it printed a few screen-fulls, ending with successfully mounting the file system I created, but then got:

Failed to mount devtmpfs at /dev: no such device

and the boot hung. Google was no help. Searching the Wandboard and Arch forums was no help. I finally went to #archlinux-arm on Freenode, where leming asked whether I had used the micro-SD card from which I was booting for another OS or machine. I had. He suggested zeroing the start of the card and reinstalling. So I did:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=1000

This cleared the first gig of the 8 gig card, more than I needed, but after reinstalling the bits, the boot succeeded.

The new Linux still tickles the CCL bug.

I'm liking Arch on the Wandboard. Fast, spare, stable. Debian worked well, too, but somehow this new install feels snappier.

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Comments (2):

BillI had been looking

Submitted by MS Jordan on Mon, 12 Jan 2015 22:32:29 GMT

Bill
I had been looking at this board for part of my ham shack.
What have you been doing with the board ?

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Just a way to test some

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 12 Jan 2015 23:09:47 GMT

Just a way to test some Lisp code running on an ARM processor. I appear to have burned up my Wandboard by plugging the wrong power supply in to it. 5V devices don't like 19V. Sigh...

I bought an ODROID-C1 to replace it.

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