Cubox [Part 1]: the arrival + Debian 'squeeze'

My first (and I say first for a reason) Cubox arrive from Solid-run this week. The reason I got the first one:

• Cheap as (99 euro)
• Need a fan-less music and phone system (mpd and asterisk) 

Experience to date

Breaking it

Booted out of the box with an HDMI cable plugged into the TV but without a network cable or adapter handy this was short lived but proved all should play nicely. Booting it directly with a network cable (headless) worked fine - check for host 'cubox' on list of router dhcp leasesfor ip address. ssh'ing in was fine given default 'cubox/cubox' and 'root/cubox' details .. all good.

Next steps were:

1. leave the default Ubuntu 10.04 on there for a quick set-up of what I need
2. install music server (sudo apt-get install mpd)
3. install asterisk (sudo apt-get install asterisk, etc)
4. update all packages (it said some were needed) ... error .. almost bricked it .. 

Well almost. I simply trashed the boot process as some of the new packages simply didn't work leaving me with a busted install and kernel panic's .. don't do an apt-get upgrade if you want to keep it working.

Fixing it

OK so rather than try and figure out where the base system could be restored from (take a back-up people - dd the whole MMC card would be my future recommendation .. that is if you want to go back to it .. I don't really want to).

Next steps:

1. get serial access sorted - nicely documented here, no problem - refresh your screen commands - this worked best for me.
2. choose a distro - I'm picking debian - http://www.solid-run.com/mw/index.php/Debian_on_CuBox
1. lot's of udev issues with wheezy so I'm going back to squeeze - consider http://www.solid-run.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=323#p1010
3. run with basic ssh server only set-up and copy over kernel / boot images.

Some hints I found useful fixing this issue:

•  If you find yourself booting a usb kernel numerous times to get the MMC card back operational again, cat /proc/partitions to find the name soyou can mount the boot partition
• As per this post make sure your boot partition contains a /boot directory ;)

Result

We now have a happy Cubox running Debian 'squeeze' .. wonderful. Now to complete the install.