2.6. Booting Pyramid Linux

Problem

OK, so far so good—you have successfully installed Pyramid Linux on your Compact Flash card and plugged it into your Soekris board. Now, how do you log in to Pyramid and get to work?

Solution

You now have three ways to communicate with your Soekris board: serial link, Ethernet, and Pyramid's Web interface. The default login is root, password root. Boot up with the serial terminal connected and Minicom running, and you'll see a nice GRUB boot screen:

	   GNU GRUB version 0.95 (639K lower / 64512K upper memory)

	+---------------------------------------------------------------+
	| Metrix                                                        |
	| Shell                                                         |
	|                                                               |
	|                                                               |
	|                                                               |
	|                                                               |
	|                                                               |
	|                                                               |
	+---------------------------------------------------------------+
	     Use the ^ and v keys to select which entry is highlighted.
	     Press enter to boot the selected OS, 'e' to edit the
	     commands before booting, or 'c' for a command-line.

By default, it will boot to Metrix, which is Pyramid Linux. Shell is for fixing filesystem problems—it goes directly to a Bash shell without mounting any filesystems, starting any services, or loading any network drivers.

On the Soekris 4521, eth0 is the Ethernet port immediately to the left of the serial port. Pyramid's default address for eth0 is 192.168.1.1. (If this doesn't work with your LAN addressing, you can easily change it via Minicom.)

SSH is enabled by default, so you can log in over SSH:

	$ ssh root@192.168.1.1

Fire up a web browser on any connected PC, point it to 192.168.1.1, and you'll be greeted by the welcome screen.

Discussion

A common task you'll boot to the Bash shell for is running the filesystem checker. This command turns on verbosity and answers "yes" to all questions:

	# bash-3.00# /sbin/e2fsck -vy /dev/hda1

It's safe to let it go ahead and fix any filesystem problems it finds. Run this when you see this warning at boot: "EXT2-fs warning: mounting unchecked fs, running e2fsck is recommended," or a warning that your filesystem was shut down uncleanly.

The web GUI offers limited functionality; you need the command line for complete control. Figure 2-1 shows the web login screen.

Pyramid Linux's web administration panel

Figure 2-1. Pyramid Linux's web administration panel

From here on out, it's plain old Ubuntu Linux, the same old configuration files and startup scripts.

Pyramid is easily hackable for noncoders because you can grab whatever Ubuntu packages you want and install them. To keep it small, there are none of the usual Ubuntu package-management tools: no apt, apt-get, nor even dpkg. Recipe 2.10 tells how to add software without these.

See Also