Ready-to-use image for from the old Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic is avalaible as suggested in RootStock Wiki .

To run Ubuntu 10,04 Lucid you can create similar .img filled by RootStock generated root file system as described in this post generating lucid-arm.img. Boot image is obtained from Lucid port page, of which I saved with the name vmlinuz-lucid-current-ports which is actually linux kernel 2.6.32-21. Running QEMU is then:

qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb -cpu cortex-a8 \
  -kernel vmlinuz-lucid-current-ports \
  -hda lucid-arm.img -m 256 -append "root=/dev/sda mem=256M devtmpfs.mount=0 rw"

However, adding -redir tcp:3232::22 isn’t directly working (although telnet is showing both directions are functional). This redirection is working with the Karmic image which gives instant ssh on my host laptop as in:

ssh localhost -oPort=3232 -l ubuntu

Note: successful QEMU machine image probably won’t boot successfully with the real board. I can’t use kernel 2.6.38-10 for Lucid rootfs on QEMU, but successfully boot that on DevKit8500D board.

QEMU console of Ubuntu 10.04 VM

I bricked one of these DevKit8500D by overvoltaged it to 12V DC. Yes, It has no regulator.

Various howto made net-boot or preinstalled images seem feasible, but trying them is another thing. The first attempt was to boot Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS to have similar distribution as my laptop, but it would stop at boot with the message

Error: unrecognized/unsupported machine ID (r1 = 0x00000ae9).

The above ID (2793 in decimal) isn’t found in Lucid released with linux 2.6.32-21. Ubuntu Natty 11.04 boot image didn’t complain because the ID already listed in /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.38/arch/arm/tools/mach-types

...
 nemini                  MACH_NEMINI             NEMINI                  2793
...

However, ubuntu-11.04-preinstalled-headless-armel+omap.img.gz wouldn’t finish loading the linux kernel 2.6.38 somehow. Hence, I replaced the root file system using rootfs created using RootStock method. After successful boot, I installed linux-image-2.6.38-8-omap_2.6.38-8.42_armel.deb to have the rootfs kernel lib files updated (this would require wireless-crda dependency to be installed).

Creating Lucid RootStock & Replacing Natty’s

Using RootStock relies much on the host environment, in my case (version 0.1.99.3) the laptop has Lucid with 2.6.38 kernel (Natty), and it failed to create rootfs with option --dist natty by stopping at this QEMU error:

qemu: fatal: cp15 insn ee1d6f70
 
R00=4009f960 R01=420822e8 R02=0d696914 R03=000086a8
R04=00008ef0 R05=00000000 R06=000097c9 R07=42082308
R08=00020040 R09=00000000 R10=4009f000 R11=00000000
R12=00008b88 R13=4007f7f8 R14=4008f450 R15=4008aea0
PSR=20000030 --C- T usr32

DevKit8500D also freezed on boot when too many seeds used in the rootfs. A minimal seeds of Lucid rootfs used is

[ubuntu-laptop]$ sudo rootstock --fqdn omap --login ubuntu --password temppwd --imagesize 2G --seed wget,nano,linux-firmware,wireless-tools,usbutils --dist lucid --serial ttyO2 --components "main universe multiverse"

It will retrieve many packages from http://ports.ubuntu.com which takes long and produces i.e. armel-rootfs-201110261541.tgz.

A card at /dev/sdb with Natty boot images are obtained by

gunzip -c ubuntu-11.10-preinstalled-server-armel+omap.img.gz | sudo dd bs=4M of=/dev/sdb

The root file system will reside at /dev/sdb2 while boot images are in /dev/sdb1. To replace this with Lucid rootfs, run following steps

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dd if=/dev/zero of=lucid-arm.img bs=1MB count=0 seek=1024
sudo mkfs.ext3 -F lucid-arm.img
sudo mount -o loop lucid-arm.img /mnt
sudo tar -C /mnt -zxf armel-rootfs-<some rootstock generated date>.tgz
sudo umount /mnt
sudo dd if=lucid-arm.img of=/dev/sdb2 bs=1MB count=0 seek=1024

There are reasons for why-not-using the included Ångström Linux (forked to linux-2.6.32-devkit8500) but this method of booting Ubuntu wasn’t straightforward after all. The on-board LAN (using Davicom DM9000AEP chip) doesn’t work and I need to use USB ethernet detected as Davicom DM9601 (a bit ridiculous?). Easycap USB video capture also works with this kernel as it has been part of 2.6.38 drivers/staging compilation.

DM9601 USB LAN

Before coming up with this combo, I’ve tried:

1. Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 CD Image: ubuntu-10.04-server-armel+omap.img
2. Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10 CD Image: ubuntu-11.10-preinstalled-server-armel+omap.img.gz
3. Robert C. Nelson’ Oneiric: ubuntu-11.10-r0-minimal-armel.tar.xz (as pointed out by the above eLinux page which has changed quite regularly since October 2011)

But nothing seemed to work.