Kernel 3.1 status

[signals]

Greetings,

I'm completely new to the Pogoplug scene. I found a Pogoplug Pro on the "clearance" rack for $20 yesterday and made an impulse buy. The original intent was to have it sit in the stereo rack connected to a USB DAC and run mpd to play audio. Unfortunately, I've run into a bit of a snag. The DAC is an asynchronous USB 2.0 device, which was not supported in 2.6.31.

So, after much searching and reading, it looks like my best chance would be to get the oxnas 3.1 kernel running on it, but I'm not even sure it's possible. There's a thread on this forum about porting 3.1, and I've found the github repository, so I suspect I could probably clone it and build it, but I can't find much information about how the system boots, and wouldn't know how to get it to boot from the new kernel even if I successfully built it. I really don't want to "brick" it a day after I bought it, and wouldn't know where to begin to try to fix it if it didn't come back up.

So, can anyone answer the following questions for me? I haven't had much luck finding definitive answers with Google.

1) Does the OX820-3.1-Linux kernel on Github work on the Pogoplug Pro at all? Or should I just give up now? It seems that there have been no commits for quite a while, has development been abandoned?

2) If I do compile a kernel, it seems that I can't just copy it into /boot and expect it to work. Is there a page that someone could link me to that explains how to install a custom kernel once I have it built? The uBoot homepage seems to be down at the moment.

Since I don't need PCI/WiFi, SATA, LEDs/GPIO or even SMP for my expected use case, I can deal with lots of broken things in the 3.1 kernel. All I really need is Ethernet, USB2.0 audio drivers, and a base system capable of NFS mounting a server and running mpd.

So, was this just just a waste of my cash? Or do I have a chance of getting this to work?

Thanks.

[WarheadsSE]

1) It works, is mildly unstable, and the SATA performance just plain sucks. ftcodes (ft- on github) is working on complete platform rewrite in his spare time to fix the problems.

2) It's not complicated, and either my upgrade script, or the install script will tell you how to flash it to NAND, but I would suggest starting with serial console to uboot & using tftp.

You ought to be able to compile in the gmac_copro_firmware & the gmac module (include MII as well), and then use NFS mount. The Ethernet controller should work fine @ GbE speeds, though you might only get ~90-100MB/s instead of 125MB/s.

[signals]

Thanks for the quick response.

I'll get busy learning how to get a uboot prompt over serial and give it a shot.

[WarheadsSE]

Fairly straight forward:

Serial - JST 4-pin, 3.3v RS232/TTL connection, FTDI or hacked up CA-42 work well. 115200,8,n , press a key to interrupt.

[bharath]

A bit off-topic which store did you pick up the pogoplug pro for $20? I would love to get my hands on another one if its available for $20.

[bodhi]

J&R
http://www.jr.com/pogoplug/pe/PGG_POGOP21/

Caveat: This Pogoplug P21 with UPC (UPC # 850877002245 ) from Buy.com was a Pogoplug E02 in disguised. But from J&R, it was a true Pogoplug Pro P21. So be aware, there is a slim chance you will get a Pogoplug E02 instead of P21.

[bharath]

These are the ones without the mini-pcie wireless, I was hoping they would be the P01 with the mini pcie wireless.