[armedslack] ARMedSlack running on Neo FreeRunner

Thu Jun 11 20:50:35 UTC 2009

I'm installing my first ARMedslack version inside Qemu at the moment. Stuart, 
your documentation is excellent! But boy! When you said the installer inside 
Qemu was slow, you wheren't kidding where you? This is 1.6Ghz iron it's 
running on, and I don't mean 1.6 dual Core :-(

Anyways, I haven't wrapped my head around how I can shave off enough MB to fit 
into the openmoko yet. That seems a different program all together. There is 
the SD card capable of ~500MB, but other than that I need to bring the rootfs 
back to ~100MB (to allow for a good margin). But that means subtracting from 
the Qemu install, because otherwise I can't compile a kernel inside Qemu.

Hmmmm, I'm not sure if I can get that right all in one go. I'll keep you 
posted on progress, but I'm allowed out of the dark basement untill monday,  
so I'm not expecting to do anything serious before then :-p

@Guilherme
You asked for advice. Feel free but just flash the device a couple of times 
with different Freerunner OS's when you get the Freerunner. Get 
USB-networking going and make yourself comfertable with ssh'ing into it. It's 
easy enough, but it's good to get a little familiar with things that work on 
the Freerunner before you sail into these uncharted waters. Oh, and if you 
don't already know how to mount jffs2 filesystems, read into that too. It's 
*ehm* different? I'm looking for a good howto :-S

And you asked about kernel messages, but that is not a big deal. They come to 
screen if you can read Real Fast, and otherwise dmesg|less does the trick 
nicely.

---
btw
I looked at the Debian and Gentoo people to see how they where doing, but it 
seems to me they are doing it very different from how I have things in mind. 
We'll see. It all depends I guess on what you want the device to do when 
you're done. Or perhaps I have to bump my nose a couple of times before I see 
what they have seen?

The trick will be to keep it small enough but workable. I had a mind to use 
the initrd of ARMedslacks installer, convert this to jffs2 just to Prove the 
Concept and thus gain something bootable. Knowing the initrd of Slackwares 
installer, there is everything you need for testing purposes. Monday.

Cheers,
Wybrand

On Thursday 11 June 2009 21:09:53 Stuart Winter wrote:
> 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