Buildroot Build Completed

Apparently I didn't get the bootloader working fully before my previous blog post. After failing at every attempt to add a terminal in the bootup scripts, it eventually occurred to me that it might not actually have booted. So, I ripped out Buildroot and used it to create an initialization ramdisk. Then I tried to use that to boot, and it failed for an unknown reason. At that point I tried using the search command of the bootloader to have the bootloader find the filesystem to run from. It also failed.

Eventually I was tired of this, and just tried setting root=/dev/sdb2 (second partition of second hard drive). Finally, this worked. However, it would do something else if I tried it on a device with more than one hard drive (it would boot from the wrong hard drive), which is why I didn't try it before. When it finished booting in two seconds, two logins popped up. Whenever I typed something in, it would go to a randomly selected login process. To fix this, I deleted the login I had added earlier, and left the login that had been automatically generated by Buildroot.

This caused it to work on my little laptop, so I tried it on Tien's (leader of the robotics club) laptop. To put it simply, it did not work. The entire screen came out flipped and most of the text was scrambled. Also his touchpad and keyboard crashed, so they wouldn't work when we booted back into Windows 10. We borrowed a mouse and keyboard from his brother and used it to access control panel. Resetting the touchpad brought both it and the keyboard back to normal. I will need to reconfigure the bootloader before I try it again on his computer.

This is the last post on this blog. I hope you have enjoyed it. I was going to make the previous post my last, but it seemed unfair to end without saying what happened with Buildroot.

kkbye