Boot debug: mounting the img on memory card in linux

[philtor]

I got my two boards last week and spent a bit of yesterday trying to get them to boot.

I went through quick start guide ( http://www.parallella.org/quick-start/ ) and put an img on a memcard following the instructions here: http://www.parallella.org/create-sdcard/

I don't see anything out of either parallalla card other than the green light and some blinking associated with the ethernet port (nothing shows up on the monitor). I've ordered the serial cable from Adafruit that's been recommended here.

Someone somewhere here mentioned that you could take the SDCard out of the Parallella and plug it back into your Linux box in order to examine the image to see if there are any log files that might indicate booting. How would one go about doing that? I plugged the SD card back into the laptop that I used to create the img (using dd, laptop runs Ubuntu) and couldn't figure out how to mount it (not sure what the -t <fstype> should be - I tried vfat and that definitely didn't work). Has anyone done this and if so what command did you use? I want to verify that the SD card was created correctly and if so I want to see if any log files have been changed that would indicate booting.

(also, I plugged in a keyboard to the usb connector and with power applied to the Parallella board I did not see the caps lock light on the keyboard come on when I pressed it - maybe that's indicative of something)

[philtor]

I got the board to boot and even ran the mandelbrot example \o/. I think the problem had something to do with the SD card reader/writer on my old ThinkPad X40. I went out and got an SD card to USB adaptor and set up the card on my Linux desktop and was able to get the board to boot just fine - one note to others who will come after: It takes a bit of a while for any text or images to show up on the monitor (probably over a minute)... I was expecting to see something show up on the monitor sooner (as when I reboot my desktop machine) and almost gave up too soon when I noticed some text flash by quickly.