[armedslack] ARMedSlack running on Neo FreeRunner

[Stuart Winter]

It's probably more simple than you think - it took me about a week in the
evenings after work to get ARMedslack installing natively on the
SheevaPlug; which involved some additional work on the installer, and
packages, which means it *should* be easier to add new ports.
I do already have the ARM build environment setup and I know
how Slackware works pretty well, so I had a head start, but even
so, it's probably not *too* much work ;-)


The main things are:
 1.  Find yourself a good kernel '.config'
     Make sure that it does NOT compile with the 'New EABI'
     # CONFIG_AEABI is not set
     To begin with it'd be easier to compile all of the hardware
     support, including filesystems, into the kernel - just to bootstrap.
     Once that's done, go back to a modular kernel.  I can add
     support to build another Kernel and initrd pretty easily.
     Check out armedslack-current/source/k/kernel.SlackBuild
     Some of it's a bit hairy (esp the installing of modules onto
     the filesystem) but it works fine!

 2. Build the kernel.

 3. Figure out what you need to do to get the Kernel onto the
    device, how you interact with the boot loader
    Usually Debian or Gentoo have done this already, so you can
    follow their documentation.

 4. Boot the Kernel and see if it works.
    Even if you use it to try and boot the existing Linux OS
    (if it has one onboard/flash) then it'll fail because the
    OS will probably be EABI and your Kernel is oldabi.
    At least it boots :-)

 5. What I did to get ARMedslack bootstrapped onto the SheevaPlug
    was to take an existing ARMedslack installation from a QEMU
    image, extract it, partition & format a USB stick, and
    rsync the QEMU image onto the usb stick.

ftp://ftp.armedslack.org/armedslack/armedslack-current/QEMU_INSTALL.TXT

You can install an ARMedslack natively using QEMU by following the
document above.
Then rather than booting the OS and rsycning from inside the
live filesystem (since that'd take *ages* and I'd have to stop udev and
stuff like that), I mounted the
QEMU disk on the x86 and rsynced from there -- follow this doc:
ftp://ftp.armedslack.org/armedslack/armedslack-devtools/sheevaplug/qemu-to-sheeva.txt

Once that's done, I booted my new 'kirkwood' (SheevaPlug) Kernel and
it booted.
Once that was done I had to do some more work to make ARMedslack's build
scripts work with another set of Kernel and Kernel modules, and add
support for root logins over serial console; stopping some packages
from being configured from the installer.

The FreeRunner probably requires other stuff - maybe some additional
support packages, or configuration changes - but to at least get
ARMedslack running so you can login remotely, it *may* be reasonably
simple!

If anybody has any questions about it then feel free to ask on here.
I intend on releasing ARMedslack next week, now that Linux 2.6.30 has
been released; and from there I'll be starting on the new EABI port
but still could add an additional architecture to ARMedslack 12.2
at a later date, since the EABI port won't be available for a long
while.

On Thu, 11 Jun 2009, Guilherme Alberici de Santi wrote:

> Hi,
> I am very interested in ARMedslack and Neo FreeRunner.
> However, I am waiting for my Neo to arrive to start working on it.
> I have no idea in where to start this task, but as soon as I have some news I can post here the progress of the work and everyone is welcome to help on this task.
>
> I don't know, but I think the first steps are to install the boot loader correctly into the NAND flash of the Neo FreeRunner and flash a kernel image with the console device drivers to be able to see the kernel messages when it was booting.
>
> Any suggestions on this stuffs?
>
> Guilherme
>
>
>
> --- Em qui, 11/6/09, w.lohman at chello.nl <w.lohman at chello.nl> escreveu:
>
> De: w.lohman at chello.nl <w.lohman at chello.nl>
> Assunto: Re: [armedslack] ARMedSlack running on Neo FreeRunner
> Para: armedslack at lists.armedslack.org
> Data: Quinta-feira, 11 de Junho de 2009, 6:16
>
> Hi!
>
> There where more people working on the ARMedslack/Freerunner combo. I'm
> curious, any progress yet?
>
> I sometimes feel these are uncharted waters and the methods for the Sheevalug
> don't translate 1:1 to the Freerunner. Alas I don't have much time on my
> hands at the moment, so I'm not progressing as fast as I'd like. But I give
> it a couple of hours per week. Most time working on this I spend reading
> though... All very interesting, but it'll be good to start something with
> #!/bin/bash again sometime soon and get some results ;-)
>
> If someone is interested in discussing what needs to be done in order to
> install ARMedslack on the Freerunner?
>
> Cheers,
> Wybrand
>
>
>
> On Saturday 30 May 2009 08:47:19 Guilherme Alberici de Santi wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> > I am new to list and also new to the Linux embedded community.
> > I work for Sony Ericsson in a project emulating hardware like the QEMU.
> > I am running Slackware in x86 hardware for years and now it is time to run
> > it on an ARM machine, but I have little background in doing this. I have
> > bought a Neo FreeRunner and want to run ARMedslack on it.
> > Does anyone have some idea on the first steps I have to go into?
> > Thanks for any help.
> >
> > Guilherme
> >
> >
> >
> >       Veja quais são os assuntos do momento no Yahoo! +Buscados
> > http://br.maisbuscados.yahoo.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
>       Veja quais são os assuntos do momento no Yahoo! +Buscados
> http://br.maisbuscados.yahoo.com

-- 
Stuart Winter
www.armedslack.org