Raspberry Pi No Login

[Neal Nelson]

On 2013-01-30 17:57 , Brett Wynkoop wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:42:40 +0100
> Neal Nelson <nealie at kobudo.homeunix.net> wrote:
>
>> HI.
>>
>> I'm able to build a bootable FreeBSD image using the beaglebone
>> scripts, which I understand is the accepted way at the moment.
>>
>> The problem I have is that everything seems to be going nicely, but I
>> never get a login prompt. The last thing I see, after the ssh key
>> generation stuff, is a line showing the date, then nothing. This is
>> true using Current as of today (2012-01-30).
>
> Greeting-
>
> It sounds like you do not have a getty running on the port you are
> connecting to for the console.  I found out the hard way that it may
> not be known as /dev/console.
>
> Try to boot single user.  If that works then do a tty to get the name
> of the port and edit /etc/ttys to start a getty on that port when the
> system goes multiuser.
>
> -Brett
>

I have no idea how to boot into single user mode on this thing as the 
boot process doesn't even pause and of course it's completely different 
to the usual process.

I found the problem in the end: for some reason only one serial console 
was enabled in /etc/ttys. This seems pretty odd for the RPI since it has 
a nice shiny HDMI port and not easily accessible serial port, but there 
you go. Easily fixed. I just have to find a way to convince the build 
script to not do it next time.

I have encountered three problems with the now nicely functional RPI:

- Even though the ethernet is configured for DHCP, it is not correctly 
configured at boot time. I can later manually start it.

- Sometimes keys are missed when I type them and sometimes they are 
repeated until I type something else. I haven't dared try any other USB 
peripherals yet.

- Installing pkgng was entertaining, as of course the bootstrap failed 
since there is no package for this architecture, but building it from 
ports did work. The speed of this thing compiling takes me back to my 
VAX days in the 80's. I think I'll have to try and cross compile some 
packages.

All in all I'm impressed that it's working at all on such a tiny 
computer. I could never have got very excited about it if I had to run 
Linux on it.