PRODUCTION RELEASES:
NOMAD 200 HDD UPGRADE INSTRUCTIONS

Upgrade instructions for Nomad 200 robots

Nomad 200 robots are shipped with a customized version of Red Hat Linux on their hard drives.  This document contains instructions for creating such a hard drive in the field.  Please note that if you are not familiar and comfortable with installing Red Hat Linux, an easier alternative may be to purchase a pre-installed hard drive from Nomadic, or to ship a hard drive to Nomadic to be installed.  To pursue either of these options, please contact sales@robots.com.

There are three major tasks in upgrading your hard drive:

  1. Install Red Hat Linux on your robot's hard drive;
  2. Customize the system for use in a power failure-safe mode; and,
  3. Install software specific to the Nomad 200.

Installing Red Hat Linux

We recommend that you obtain a new hard drive for performing this installation; this way, you will be able to resume using your old system if the installation fails, and you will not risk losing valuable data.

The Nomad 200 hard drive release is based on Red Hat Linux version 6.1. You will need to obtain this distribution either on CD or via the Internet. In any case, the easiest way to install it is to place it on an NFS-exported filesystem on your LAN so that you can access it via NFS.  You will need to install a standard ethernet card in the system, because the RangeLAN ISA card is not recognized by Red Hat's installation system. You will want to use the bootnet.img installation floppy; please see the Red Hat documentation for instructions on installation using an NFS mounted partition.

Install the packages

Begin with a standard installation of Red Hat Linux. Specific instructions will not be given here and the user is referred to the installation documentation included with your distribution. As a general guideline, try to minimize the number of packages installed to only those necessary, in order to minimize the time it takes for the system to boot and the system resources consumed at runtime. For example, it is generally not necessary to install printer support, the sendmail daemon, or the gpm console mouse server.

Customizing the system

Now you will want to customize the system so that it will operate in a read-only mode, which will protect the filesystems if power is suddenly lost.  Instructions for doing so can be found here.

Installing Software

At this point the drive should boot into read-only mode with no problems. The only thing left is to install the software packages to control the robot hardware.

Installing the RPM packages

Download the following packages to /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386:

i200m-1.0.0-1.i386.rpm

robotd-2.6.11-1.i386.rpm

Install them as follows (note that they must be installed in the correct order, as the robotd package depends on the presence of the i200m package):

# cd /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386
# rpm -i i200m-1.0.0-1.rpm
# rpm -i robotd-2.6.11-1.rpm

BACK

Last modified 13 July 2001 by jake