The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Some notes based on The woods and trees of OpenSuSE on single-board computers – image abbreviations – and getting it installed using OS X « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff.

I needed to get Ubuntu on an ODROID-C1+ (as it looks like nobody is maintaining a current OpenSuSE for it).

Installing the ODROID-C1+ image using OS X

Download image

Download either of these (note that “minimal” is different from “mate minimal”; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOYWx_YToh8) from de.eu.odroid.in/ubuntu_16.04lts:

• 1 gigabyte – de.eu.odroid.in/ubuntu_16.04lts/ubuntu-16.04-mate-odroid-c1-20160727.img.xz
• 175 megabyte – de.eu.odroid.in/ubuntu_16.04lts/ubuntu-16.04-minimal-odroid-c1-20160817.img.xz

Put image on SD card

I installed on a 8 gigabyte SD card that revealed itself as /dev/disk1 using this diskutil command (via osx – List all devices connected, lsblk for Mac OS X – Ask Different [WayBack])

diskutil list

So this wrote the image to SD card in a sudo su - prompt:

targetDevice="disk1"
unxz --keep ubuntu-16.04-minimal-odroid-c1-20160817.img.xz; \
diskutil umount "/dev/${targetDevice}s1"; \
dd bs=1m of="/dev/r${targetDevice}" if=ubuntu-16.04-minimal-odroid-c1-20160817.img; \
sync; \
diskutil list; \
diskutil eject "/dev/${targetDevice}"

Boot and first time steps on Odroid

Use the default user and password that [WayBack] ODROID Forum • View topic – Ubuntu Minimal User / Password mentions:

odroid login: root
Password: odroid

From there, create a new user and add it to the sudo group (I used visudo to check the correct group for sudoers) :

adduser jeroenp
addgroup jeroenp sudo

And then hook it up to the network and get the IP address:

ifconfig

Now you can ssh into the odroid with user jeroenp and the password assigned to it. You can also perform a sudo su - to get to root level.

ssh and configure a few things

First of all, install etckeeper as it’s a life saver:

apt-get install etckeeper

This will install some other packages, but that’s OK; it will end suggesting you to enter email address, name and perform an initial commit:

Initialized empty Git repository in /etc/.git/

*** Please tell me who you are.

Run

  git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
  git config --global user.name "Your Name"

to set your account's default identity.
Omit --global to set the identity only in this repository.

fatal: unable to auto-detect email address (got 'root@odroid.(none)')
etckeeper commit failed; run it by hand

Do that:

cd /etc
git config --global user.email "example@example.org"
git config --global user.name "Example User"
git commit -m "initial commit"

Now perform these steps:

1. Change the root password
2. Disable etckeeper daily autocommits
3. Change the hostname
4. Update/Upgrade/Distribution-upgrade
5. Fix the cursor in console mode

Change root password:

# sudo su -
# passwd
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully

Disable etckeeper daily autocommits involves one line in /etc/etckeeper/etckeeper.conf:

-#AVOID_DAILY_AUTOCOMMITS=1
+AVOID_DAILY_AUTOCOMMITS=1

Change the hostname; assuming your new host name is newHostName.

1. edit /etc/hosts and replace the old hostname with newHostName
2. Perform these commands:
   hostnamectl set-hostname newHostName
exec bash
hostname -f

Both the command prompt and the hostname output should show newHostName.

Update/Upgrade:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Fix the cursor in console mode:

Somehow the Odroid C1+ does not support a blinking hardware text cursor.

–jeroen