Preparing a USB stick for upgrading Platinum modules

Requirements

• A computer running Linux.
• A USB stick that can be erased, 1GB or greater.
• Some Linux knowledge.

If the instructions on this page cannot be followed, then please request a USB upgrade stick from Güralp Systems. We will provide a ready-made stick and adaptor cable directly to you. The cable and stick together are part number MG-ELP-0096. The cable on its own is part number CAS-DCM-0038.

If you would rather build your own, follow the procedure below.

Identify the device-name

When you first insert a USB stick into a Linux computer, it is automatically be allocated a device-name. The driver presents the USB stick as a SCSI disk, so the device-name will begin "sd". This will be followed by an automatically-allocated letter. We will need to look at the kernel messages to discover which name has been allocated.

Insert the USB stick into a USB socket on the computer.  Wait for ten seconds to allow the kernel to recognise the device, then run the command dmesg.  The output should contain lines like

The device-name in this example is sdb, although the name on your system may well be different. Note that sdb refers to the physical device while sdb1 refers to the first partition on that device.

It is possible to use a device which is not partitioned. In this case, there will be no line like sdb: sdb1 above. This is not a problem because we will create the sdb1 partition as part of the procedure below.

Prepare USB stick

Partition the USB stick. The partition table must be in DOS (MBR) format and not in EFI format (which is becoming the default on newer systems). It is normally sufficient to create a single partition covering the whole device. The following commands can be used:

(It is, of course, necessary to substitute sdb with the name of the actual device.)

Create an ext2 file-system on the new partition. The following commands should be suitable for creating the file-system:

(again, substitute sdb with the name of the actual device.)

The three commands above are interactive under certain circumstances so, if copying them, paste them onto the command line one by one so you can react to any prompts.

Now mount the stick somewhere it can be accessed, usually on /mnt:

Download required scripts and firmware

Scripts

Use the following wget commands to download the scripts to be run on the device. If you are using a mount point other than /mnt, substitute its path in place of /mnt.

Choose architecture(s)

You do not need to load firmware for every possible architecture. Choose the desired architecture(s) from the table below to generate a customised download command, given in the next section:

The difference between CMG-DCM-mk4-eabi and CMG-DCM-mk4 is in the build number. If you know the units being upgraded are already at build 10000 or greater, then only the eabi version is required. Otherwise, get both versions.

The upgrade scripts automatically know which firmware they need so, if unsure, simply download all the architectures.

Firmware

Use the following rsync command to download the required firmware, changing the italicised text (ARCH and /mnt) as required:

Use the following rsync command to download the required firmware, changing the italicised text (/mnt) as required:

This command can be run again at any time to update the firmware on the USB stick, only downloading files which have changed.

If you need to add any additional architectures, simply run the rsync command above again, choosing the architectures that you wish to add.

Finally, dismount the USB device with the command

substituting the name of the actual device used in place of sdb1.

For more information, first contact your local distributor or email .