RaqBuntu lives!
After trying to be smart about it and figure out my own way to get Ubuntu 8.04 on the RAQ3 I decided to just suck it up and follow others leads. So, I followed Jim Tuttle’s site about getting Ubuntu 6.06 on his Qube. The Qube and Raq are very similar as far as I can tell so I thought I would have some success with this. I combined this with Tim Wiley’s instructions for building a fresher kernel. Success! At this point I had a working Ubuntu 6.06 install.
So, I crossed my fingers and used upgrade-manager to bring it to 8.04. The first time I ran it it timed out on one of the mirrors. That was a little scary but it looked like it probably recovered ok from it so I tried the same thing again. Success! Almost seemed too easy. After some time it asked if I wanted to remove obsolete apps so I did and then asked to reboot, which I did. Came right back up and showed 8.04 and the uname -r still showed my custom kernel.
Sweet!
I haven’t really put any time on the box yet so I don’t know how it’ll perform but it looks pretty stable right now. I’m going to try to clone the drive to the RAQ3i drive so I don’t have to go through the rather lengthy process again. It all works but it’s hours long. Kernel compiling on the RAQ isn’t what I’d call a snappy process.
More later once I get Asterisk up and running.
Hey Scott,
I’m glad you were able to get Ubuntu on your Cube. I’m sort of surprised that you were able to upgrade to 8.04. I vaguely recall that someone wrote to me about not being able to install 7.04 due to a change in the boot image or something. Anyway, very glad it worked for you and thanks for dropping me a line.
Jim,
Thanks for dropping the note! I don’t think it makes any difference but these are RAQ3′s not Qubes.
One thing I found was many comments about not using apt-get dist-upgrade. Apparently it’s less thorough about the upgrade than upgrade-manager.
Anyway, more posts later as I actually start to use these things and see if they are working properly.
Hi Scott,
RAQ, sorry. If you have specific corrections to make I’d be glad to incorporate them.
Thanks,
Jim
Scott, have you had a chance to make a RAQ image that you are willing to put up and share? I also have 2 RAQ3′s I’d love to run ubuntu on.
Thnx
Dickie
Dickie, nope. I’ve had both Raq’s in my rack for a couple of months now. In that time I had the 3i running as an IPCOP firewall. It worked ok but wasn’t that good. I think mine had a bad firmware because I could never get it to boot properly without helping it with the rommon commands. I also think I had some performance issues.
The other Raq I tried hard to get Asterisk running properly on it but I ran into some problems and performance issues. Compounding that with the lengthy re-image process and it just wasn’t worth my time.
Long story short, I’ll be pulling the Raq’s out and trying to sell them in the next month or so.