Amahi Plug Edition

Amahi "Plug Edition" — How to run Amahi on your Plug Computer!

For discussions see the Amahi Plug Computer Forum.

Supported devices

• Ionics Plugs
• GuruPlug
• SheevaPlug
• OpenRD Client
• OpenRD Base (unverified)

Supported but not recommended, due to compatibility or speed:

• TonidoPlug
• Rooted Pogoplug — (256 RAM)
• Rooted Seagate DockStar — (128MB RAM - a little slow)
• Any other device based on the Marvell Plug Computer

Known Issues:

• OpenRD Ultimate will need some tweaking as the current kernel does not support OpenRD Ultimate yet.
• eSata SheevaPlug will need an updated kernel to support the eSata port (#850)

Requirements

You'll need:

• A Linux Computer
• A storage device, of 2GB or more, that your plug computer can boot from
• The latest Amahi "rootfs" from the Amahi4Plug repo look for the latest file named amahi-marvell-*.tar.bz2
• This script to copy the above rootfs into your storage device. Important: you will have to modify this script to suit your device, as it obliterates the content of it

Quick Overview

Because of the headless nature of the Plug devices, there are some more steps than the typical Amahi release to make things work smoothly.

There are three major steps in getting things going

Step 1

Download the latest rootfs image then use the script to extract and put it into an empty USB hard drive, USB flash drive, or SD card (depending on what your device supports). While it does that, you may want to setup a profile for your HDA at Amahi

Step 2

Boot your device using the drive or card you created in step 1. Find out the IP it got assigned from your existing DHCP server (typically your router). Alternately if you have console access log in at the console prompt (user: admin, password: amahi) and run /sbin/ifconfig. The ip address is at the second line of the eth0 section (inet addr)

Step 3

Install Amahi, by loading http://plug_ip:2000 and entering the install code you got when you created your Amahi profile.

Known issues

For a list of working / not working apps for plug computers, see Plug Apps page. Also, please check and file any issues in the Amahi bug tracker project for the Plug port

Detailed Installation Instructions

Fully detailed procedure.

Step 1: Prepare your boot device

Connect your boot device (USB hard drive, USB flash drive, or SD card) into a working Linux machine (you can use your plug computer!)

If needed, partition your device to create a partition you'll use to boot. No need to format it.

If a swap partition is desired (highly recommended for the PogoPlug & DockStar), create a second partition on your storage device, between 512MB and 2GB (depending on how big your storage device is), and format it as Linux Swap.

Example partitioning depending on your boot device type & size:

2GB Flash Drive or SD Card	4GB Flash Drive or SD Card	8GB Flash Drive or SD Card	16GB Flash Drive or SD Card	USB Hard Drive (40+ GB)
2GB, unformatted	4GB, unformatted	512MB, Linux Swap 7.5GB, unformatted	1GB, Linux Swap 15GB, unformatted	2GB, Linux Swap The rest, unformatted

Download the Amahi rootfs file and create-clean-f12-disk.sh script into your Linux machine. Don't store them on the storage device you want to use on your plug computer.
Edit the create-amahi-f12-plug-disk.sh script:

• Change the first line, the one that says partition="..." to point to the partition you want to use to boot your plug computer.
  If you're not sure, ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/ and see if you can find it there.
• Change the second line swap="..." to point to the partition you want to use for swap. If you do not have a swap partition just set this to a partition that does not exist.
• Change the third line, if needed. It should contain the name of the Amahi rootfs file you downloaded. Example: rootfs="amahi-marvell-1.0.tar.bz2"
• Comment (add a # character at the beginning of) the two following lines, the ones that say echo "Please edit this script... and exit 0.

BIG WARNING! Putting the wrong partitions in this script will completely erase those partitions! Be careful what partitions you target!

Run the create-amahi-f12-plug-disk.sh script under root:

     sh create-amahi-f12-plug-disk.sh

Step 2: Boot your plug

Boot the plug computer with your newly created drive/card attached. Give it a few minutes to boot, and it will be ready for the Amahi installation.

If you need help getting your plug computer to boot from USB or SD, instead of the on-board Flash memory, see our Marvell Plug Computer Booting page.

Step 3: Install Amahi

Note that for this step to work correctly, your plug computer needs to have access to Internet. Maybe you can just SSH into it, and ping www.amahi.org to make sure it works.

Find the plug computer IP address (check your router DHCP logs or DHCP server), and launch the Amahi installer by visiting http://plug_computer_ip:2000

(Use nmap or ping -b to find new devices on your LAN, if you can't find your plug computer IP address on your DHCP server.)

It will ask for an install code. That code can be obtained by creating an Amahi profile here: https://www.amahi.org/user (you'll need to create an account first, if you don't already have one).

Enjoy

After it reboots, access your HDA by logging in at http://plug_computer_ip

   Username: admin
   Password: amahi

The root password is: amahi
(Change it!)

Post Install Action

If all seems to work, you can now disable your old DHCP server, and let your plug computer act as your new DHCP server.

You'll need to release and then renew the IP address of your client computers, once your old DHCP server is disabled.

You'll then be able to access the Amahi dashboard at http://hda, and your installed apps using http://app_name

If you created a swap partition while partitioning your storage device, you might need to tell Amahi to use that partition for swap space. You'll need to change /dev/sda2 for the real path to your swap partition. SSH into your Amahi server, and execute the following:

    mkswap /dev/sda2
    swapon -a

You will also need to edit the /etc/fstab file to use that new partition at startup

Check that everything is now working with

        free

The total on the swap line should not be 0 if all worked out. Otherwise make sure the fstab has the right device for swapping.

Note: On the SheevaPlug, the onboard NAND flash is called /dev/mtdblock2. You might want to use it as a swap partition, as it would be faster than your SD card or USB drive.

Customize and Extend

If you need customizations for your device, you can install the ARM cross compilation toolset to compile things like the kernel, multimedia libraries, etc. etc.

Tips and Tricks

Tips, tricks and howto's can be found at Plug Tips and Tricks

Known Issues

• See Plug_warboard for documented issues.

These are mostly what matter for debugging:

bash code
​/root/hda-install.log​

bash code
​egrep -v 'POST|GET|progress' /tmp/amahi-ruby-install.log​