Gumstix initial bringup

I bought a Gumstix Verdex GS-270, along with a small motherboard that has serial, USB and power connectors. For initial bringup I also installed Ubuntu 6.10 Linux on a PC to act as my development host. I've figured out how to get logged in to Linux on the Gumstix, and I'm documenting it step by step here.

This was my goal!

# uname -a
Linux gumstix 2.6.18gum #1 Wed Feb 28 18:05:43 PST 2007 armv5tel unknown

The basic sequence included getting at the serial port on the Dell, configuring it correctly, and figuring out which of the two serial ports on the motherboard has the console output.

1. Download Ubuntu 600MB CD image - I used OSX, then used Disk Utility to burn it to a CD, and installed it on the PC, quite straightforward.
   
2. Ubuntu doesn't include comms by default. I ran aptitude to search for programs and found a comms package that includes mincom and cu, so I installed both of them.
3. The gumstix Wiki eventually revealed these setup instructions, which are to use mincom, turn off hardware and software flow control and set 115200-N-1 mode.
   
4. This picture shows a similar motherboard, with the console port connected to the second serial port, which also worked for me.
5. I connected the serial and USB cables, plugged in the power supply, and a small green LED glowed on the motherboard, nice confirmation that its on.
   
6. After watching various boot messages, I logged in as root, with the initial password gumstix.
   

Sounds simple, but as usual, this took quite a while for me to figure out from scratch.... There are also instructions on how to interface and develop using Windows or OSX, but I wanted to do some comparative benchmarking of PC vs. ARM running similar releases of Linux 2.6.

Configuration messages at boot:

U-Boot 1.1.4 (Mar 1 2007 - 17:10:55) - PXA270@600 MHz - 1321

*** Welcome to Gumstix ***

U-Boot code: A3F00000 -> A3F25850 BSS: -> A3F5AE70
RAM Configuration:
Bank #0: a0000000 128 MB
Flash: 32 MB

.... some more messages then:

Linux version 2.6.18gum (craig@azazel) (gcc version 4.1.1) #1 Wed Feb 28 18:05:7
CPU: XScale-PXA270 [69054117] revision 7 (ARMv5TE), cr=0000397f
Machine: The Gumstix Platform
Memory policy: ECC disabled, Data cache writeback
Run Mode clock: 208.00MHz (*16)
Turbo Mode clock: 624.00MHz (*3.0, active)
Memory clock: 104.00MHz (/2)
System bus clock: 104.00MHz
CPU0: D VIVT undefined 5 cache
CPU0: I cache: 32768 bytes, associativity 32, 32 byte lines, 32 sets
CPU0: D cache: 32768 bytes, associativity 32, 32 byte lines, 32 sets

Interesting information on 32-way cache associativity, which I did not see mentioned in the specs.

The 32MB flash memory is mounted as a filesystem, with 8MB taken up by the default installation.

# df
Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mtdblock1 31.8M 8.0M 23.8M 25% /

The system supports IP networking over USB, which I have plugged in but I don't have working yet (its supposed to come up automatically, but doesn't). Thats next.