What are the chances this will work on the DreamPlug?

[Kevlar2010]

I have just recently jumped into Asterisk with an Elastix install of one server and about 30 phones.  When doing research, I ran across this forum and the whole plug computing idea.  Now I am quite taken with the idea of setting up a home PBX to integrate with my google voice number and possibly even tie back in to the Asterisk server at work.

With that said, I see tons of mentions on the Sheeva and Guru plugs, but the Dream plug would appear to be too new to have gotten much mention.  I am thinking of picking one up and am curious what those who have done this before think about the chances that this would all install and work on one of those and what pitfalls there might be?  It's the same manufacturer, so I am hoping the news would be good.  I am comfortable in Linux, new to the arm architecture, and love the idea of a low power draw computer to handle this stuff around the home.

http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/c-5-dreamplugs.aspx

Besides the pbx application, I also have in mind to move my video sharing from my desktop to this (right now I am using TVersity on Windows XP to share videos stored on an external hard drive to multiple XBox 360 Arcades).

[PlugPBX Admin]

All this and more are possible. The only way to find out for sure is to try. Are others able to easily install debian linux on the DreamPlug? That's the key answer for you to seek.

Sheeva is 'older' and more established, things just work, you will risk more pain with a newer device than a tested and established solution. Time is money, do you have the time and skills? Just considerations.

[Kevlar2010]

Well, I just looked at the support site, and as of four days ago, it does appear that there are Debian install files available, so that is very good news.  I have also seen a few forum posts elsewhere that seems to indicate that they will be shipping it in the future with Debian, though many people have one with Ubuntu pre-installed.
http://code.google.com/p/dreamplug/downloads/list

Time I have as this would be a hobby project for home, though with possible business implications later.  The skills I have unless it involves writing code, in which case I would get above my head fairly quickly.  I am fine with compiling, but having to modify code to make it work would probably not happen.

As a side note, is it recommended to get the jtag module or is that not necessary?

[PlugPBX Admin]

Depends. Are you going to use the devices internal NAND or run from external media like SD card or USB device?

That in itself opens up questions like the filesystem you use on NAND, because you don't want to have the device eat its own internal storage due to excessive writes. (Hence why we hacked in flashybrid - yes its not on a released disk image yet...instructions on forums how to setup) or you use things like jffs, or you use read-only type bootup with RAM disks etc etc...

Welcome to embedded hacking, its fun

[Kevlar2010]

Well, from what the specs say, the internal card is a 2 GB microSD card that is replaceable.  I would however want to run from an external SD card and also have an external USB drive for serving media.  I guess that would make the JTAG quite necessary from the reading I did today.

I can tell this is fun stuff.  I haven't even ordered one and am already trying to figure out all the fun stuff to do with it.

[gpbx]

Kevlar2010 - Did you ever take the plunge & purchase the Dreamplug?  If so, how did it go?  Also, did you end up purchasing the JTAG module?  If so, how useful is it and how much have you end up using?

I'm contemplating running PBX along with network services like dns, dhcp, etc.  Any experiences that you have had w/ the OS SD install/boot along with PBX experiences would be much appreciated.

-gpbx

[ribblegibble]

I have PlugPBX mostly working on the Dreamplug. It took some doing and so I decided to document the procedure here,  in the hope that it may be useful to someone else.

I bought the Jtags unit and I consider it essential if you want to undertake this project.

What's working:

FreePBX configured for In/Outbound calls to my SIP provider.
Web interface works
Webmin works
Munin works
Voicemail works from web interface and from my phone
IVR working

What's not working:

Dahdi - I couldn't get the kernel from PlugPBX to work, which isn't surprising as the dreamplug is somewhat different to the Shiva/Guru. I ended up using the default kernel provided by Globalscale, which doesn't have the Dahdi kernel modules. Not a problem for me as I don't want to use any FXO/FXS stuff.

TLS - haven't been able to get this working yet, am keen to do so. If anyone has it working, would appreciate any pointers.

Outbound DID not received - Incoming DID is fine, this might be provider related.

What I did, here are the steps I took :
(I'm using FreeBSD, so any commands I use may be different if you're using a different OS)

1.  Download PlugPBX
2.  Write image to MicroSD card using dd or similar
3.  Remove 1st slice from newly written card and replace it with a fat partition
     (The version of uBoot on Dreamplug will not load kernel from ext2 partitions.)

4.  Download the kernel file and Debian filesystem from Globalscale.
5.  On the fat partition of your new card copy the kernel files from Globalscale (especially uImage)
6.  You will need to copy /lib/modules from the Globalscale Debian filesystem to the 2nd (ext) partition.
7.  Remove /etc/init.d/dahdi
     (Doesn't work anyway, and causes problems at boot time.)
8.  Edit /etc/fstab and change the UUIDs back to real devices (/dev/sdb1 for boot, sdb2 for root, no swap)
     (You can change them back later if you want, but I doubt that it matters in this case)
     
9.  Plug the card into the Dreamplug, Configure your USB/Serial terminal and power it up.
10.Interrupt the boot sequence (quick, only 3 seconds) 
11.Enter the following commands to tell Dreamplug to boot into PlugPBX:

     setenv x_bootargs_root root=/dev/sdb2 rootdelay=15
     setenv x_bootcmd_kernel fatload usb 2 1x6400000 uImage
     saveenv
     reset

12. PlugPBX will boot and you should be able to log in to the web interface.

There are a few more things to do before the system will work properly.

1.  If you want to use Webmin, edit /etc/webmin/config and change  referers_none=0 from =1
2.  Edit /etc/amportal.conf and make any changes you need -
     I changed Authtype to database and set up AMPEXTENSIONS=deviceanduser from extensions
3.  Run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade (don't run distupgrade, trys to upgrade the kernel and fails)
     You may need to add missing public keys
     
     gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv KEY
     gpg --export --armor KEY | apt-key add -

     The key-id you need will be in the NO_PUBKEY error message apt-get throws.

4. You can try to access the FreePBX gui now, but will likely get a Fatal DB error.
    Apache logs show that there is a php problem loading various modules. To fix this:

    apt-get install php5-mysql
    apt-get install php5-mcrypt

5. Edit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
    The version of this file installed by apt-get upgrade sends all errors to standard output, this makes the   FreePBX gui look ugly. Set appropriate options.

You should now be able to login to the gui and configure trunks, routes, devices extensions etc. The version of FreePBX is a little long in the tooth now, but it can be upgraded from the web interface. I have version 2.8 running at the moment.

[PlugPBX Admin]

Thats great! Thanks for the info.

If you want, if you get a 'clean' working DreamPlug Image based on mine - you are more than welcome to upload it here and we can post it for the masses to download and flash. Its entirely up to you.

Sharing the 'how to' is always more important of course. Again thanks for the information!!

[ribblegibble]

Hi Greg,

I have an image available, if you would like to put it on your server that would be great. It's about 600Mb compressed, do you have an ftp server I can upload it to?

Thanks for all your hard work, PlugPBX sure made things a lot easier for me!

[JmsCrk]

Thanks for your notes ribblegibble, I managed to install PlugPBX on a dreamplug and it was mostly due to your instructions as I'm pretty new at all this.

There were a few differences when I tried it:

1. I didn't have to change the partition type to FAT on the first partition (Your step 5) - I assume my model of DreamPlug has a newer version of the loader that can now handle whatever file system it is.
2. I didn't get mysql or php errors so didn't need to upgrade per your steps 4 & 5 in the second part of your instructions.
3. I updated FreePBX all the way to 2.9 using the GUI updater, this worked but threw a few little errors along the way that Google helped with.

Thanks again for your handy pointers!

[gpbx]

Hi JmsCrk,
I have a dreamplug as well w/ the latest uboot.  I have tried everything, but have been unable to get the dreamplug to boot to the plugpbx image.

Please checkout my post regarding the problem I am having: http://forums.plugpbx.org/index.php/topic,286.0.html

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

BTW, anyway to get a copy of your image? That might help me in figuring out the problem.

-gpbx

Thanks for your notes ribblegibble, I managed to install PlugPBX on a dreamplug and it was mostly due to your instructions as I'm pretty new at all this.

There were a few differences when I tried it:

1. I didn't have to change the partition type to FAT on the first partition (Your step 5) - I assume my model of DreamPlug has a newer version of the loader that can now handle whatever file system it is.
2. I didn't get mysql or php errors so didn't need to upgrade per your steps 4 & 5 in the second part of your instructions.
3. I updated FreePBX all the way to 2.9 using the GUI updater, this worked but threw a few little errors along the way that Google helped with.

Thanks again for your handy pointers!

[gpbx]

Could someone *please* provide a working PlugPBX DreamPlug image?  I have spent countless hours in trying to get the dreamplug to boot to the plugpbx image (betaimageDec22-dhcpfixed4G.img) with no luck.

-gpbx

[gpbx]

Here's what I have done so far:

    - Downloaded Image: http://downloads.plugpbx.org/betaimageDec22-dhcpfixed4G.img.bz2
    - Verified md5 checksum to be correct for the image betaimageDec22-dhcpfixed4G.img = 4c990e3c49045a397291bca61ba01659
    - Used dd if=betaimageDec22-dhcpfixed4G.img of=/dev/sdb to write-out the ~3GB image to a 8GB SD card

                dd output is the following:  dd: writing to `/dev/sdb': Input/output error
                6173945+0 records in
                6173944+0 records out
                3161059328 bytes (3.2 GB) copied, 3027.19 s, 1.0 MB/s

            Note 1: I had downloaded the image a few times and had verified the md5 checksum to be correct as per the download site.  Used dd on linux & mac osx to write out the image to the card but all attempts yielded similar error/output.       
            Note 2: Even though 'dd' in/out records are different, I am able to mount both ext2 partitions & access the filesystems/files:  (/dev/sdb1) & the root (/dev/sdb2)
    4.  I had also tried using fdisk to create partitions and then set them of the correct type (83).  The pbxforum has some discrepancy about whether
         or not the first/boot parition should be FAT16 or EXT2 partition. I had tried both; neither worked.  I am running the latest uBoot (
U-Boot 2011.06-02334-g8f495d9-dirty (May 31 2011 - 02:06:26). I believe the latest uBoot allows for booting the kernel from an ext2 partition.


 Here is the fdisk -l betaimageDec22-dhcpfixed4G.img

    fdisk -l betaimageDec22-dhcpfixed4G.img
    You must set cylinders.
    You can do this from the extra functions menu.

    Disk betaimageDec22-dhcpfixed4G.img: 0 MB, 0 bytes
    255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 0 cylinders
    Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    Disk identifier: 0x00072ced

                             Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
    betaimageDec22-dhcpfixed4G.img1   *           1          28      224878+  83  Linux
    betaimageDec22-dhcpfixed4G.img2              29         471     3558397+  83  Linux
    betaimageDec22-dhcpfixed4G.img3             472         499      224910    5  Extended
    betaimageDec22-dhcpfixed4G.img5             472         499      224878+  82  Linux swap / Solaris


   5. Interesting uBoot environment:
db_init=setenv mainlineLinux yes; setenv arcNumber 2659; usb start
x_bootcmd_kernel=fatload usb 1:1 0x6400000 uImage
x_bootargs_root=root /dev/sdb2 rootdelay=10
_____________________________________________________________________________________

I think the problem could be one of the following:

    corrupted betaimageDec22-dhcpfixed4G.img image
    uBoot environment variable incorrect/incomplete.  I have seen the following uBoot env. variable to have different values to enable external SD booting:

        setenv x_bootcmd_kernel mw 1x6400000 0 1000; fatload usb 2 1x6400000 uImage versus
        setenv x_bootcmd_kernel mw 0x6400000 0 1000; fatload usb 1:1 0x6400000 uImage

        I am not sure if the "loadaddr" should be 0x6400000 or 1x6400000.  Also, since we're trying to boot the the external SD card's 1st partition, should we be using the "usb 1:1" (ie: 2nd usb device since usb0 is the first device and 1st partition)

Can anyone who has gotten this stuff working upload the following:
1) a working plugpbx image for the dreamplug
2) Working uBoot environment variables.

It'll save me and hopefully lotsa other folks the heartache that I went/am still going through.

-g

[bazza14]

If you're booting of the internal sd card

Code:

setenv x_bootcmd_kernel fatload usb 0 0x6400000 uImage
setenv x_bootargs_root root=/dev/sda2 rootdelay=10

If you're booting of an external sd card

Code:

setenv x_bootcmd_kernel fatload usb 1 0x6400000 uImage
setenv x_bootargs_root root=/dev/sdb2 rootdelay=10

If you're booting of a usb stick

Code:

setenv x_bootcmd_kernel fatload usb 2 0x6400000 uImage
setenv x_bootargs_root root=/dev/sdc2 rootdelay=10

[JmsCrk]

I've just had to re-do this after a power failure somehow corrupted my system.

I previously had PlugPBX running on the Dreamplug for about 6 months with no problems, and as I've gone through the setup process this time I've written it all down.

I'm no expert, but you can check out how I got it to work here on my blog: http://jmscrk.com/blog/installing-plugpbx-dreamplug

I can also release the image for others to use but it's quite a large file so I'm tracking down somewhere to make it available, stay tuned.