Mele: SD-card image, "Lui"

"Lui" is my codename for this build. Puppy built from Ubuntu Lucid Lynx armel binary packages. It is alpha quality. This is an SD-card image, for a 4GB card.

Download the image from here. The image file is only 87.1MB, includes all applications:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/arm/releases/alpha/

Further explanation:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/arm/releases/alpha/README-mele-sd-4gb-lui-5.2.90.htm

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Comments

touch screen?


Lui on Mele A2000
Username: eternal-sunshine
"Many thanks for this Barry. Two stupid questions as I'm having problems getting it to run after following your directions. Does it output to VGA (don't have an HDMI display?) What should I fornmat the SD card to? ext 2/3 or fat32? Sorry for dumb questions.

lui on Mele A2000
Username: eternal-sunshine
"Thanks aarf, The SD card was formatted fat32 in lupu 528. The dd seemed to complete (after 30 mins) and I get a 16MB fat16 partition and a 3.65GB ext4. Lupu can read the fat 16 but not the ext4. For the ext4 Gparted say "e2label no such device or address...couldnt find valid superblock." Stuck.

"4GB" SD cards
Username: BarryK
"You guys must be having problems with smaller SD cards. For example of card being /dev/sdb, this will tell you the size in bytes of the card: # disktype /dev/sdb The image file is 3,999,998,976 bytes. Right now I am experimenting with a 1GB image, in which the second partition can be increased to fill the card.

re VGA
Username: BarryK
"I have only used the HDMI output, I don't know if VGA works.

4GB SD cards
Username: eternal-sunshine
""You guys must be having problems with smaller SD cards". No, I checked as you suggested and the card was well over the required size. In fact dd made a fat32 and an ext4 partiton and there was space left on the card. Apart from the SD card issue I only have a VGA display so will have to wait a couple of days to try on an HDMI input.

4 GB cards
Username: eternal-sunshine
"Sorry, I meant to say Fat16 not Fat32 above. Just to check, fdisk -l gives me a card size of 4011851776 bytes. Gparted (in lupu 528) gives me: Fat16 total 16MiB , used 4.21MiB Ext4 totsl 3.65GiB , used 413.26MiB Unallocated 71MiB. If these seem about right then I guess it's a VGA issue.

Re SD image
Username: BarryK
"eternal-sunshine, when you use 'dd', some things to do... make sure card unmounted # unxz --stdout mele-sd-4gb-lui-5.2.90.img.xz | dd of=/dev/sdb # sync ...that final "sync" is important, to make sure filesystem buffers are flushed before you unplug the card. Otherwise, card may be corrupted.

tarball
Username: mavrothal
"Would it be possible to post the SDcard content as a tarball? I got an [url=http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-1.75]XO-1.75 that has a ARMv7 [url=http://www.marvell.com/application-processors/armada-600/armada-610.jsp]Armada 610 SoC and I want to see if I can get it going after replacing the kernel etc. (BTW it runs Fedora 17 very nicely)

Tested it
Username: BarryK
"I have verified that the online .img.xz file works. I downloaded it, wrote it to SD card, booted up on my Mele. yep, OK.

Easy Fixed Sm 4G SD
Username: Ted Dog
"Ran out of space during dd command (about 10000M short) [code] fsck.ext4 -f /dev/mmcblk0p2 resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2 3000M [/code] All good now

Re VGA
Username: BarryK
"Great! We should be able to get VGA to work. It is specified in the file 'evb.bin' in the first partition (also called 'script.bin' in some online docs). This is a compiled configuration file, that is uncompiled with 'bin2fex' and compiled with 'fex2bin'. Uncompiled, it is a plain text file. But, I don't know exactly how. In theory, probably it is possible to activate both HDMI and VGA.

QEMU w/ SD img
Username: Ted Dog
"Still waiting my meleA1000, found this link, running a SD image like LuiPuppy with QEMU also has a link to a script that put it all together. http://wiki.gumstix.org/index.php?title=Gumstix_Emulation_for_QEMU

questions ?
Username: Nik0
"Hi, Great job ! Just some beginner questions: - I wrote the image to my SD, my Mele is still booting on Android. There is something else to do ? How to check if the SD is correct ? - I also have nothing on the console port, what are the setting ? There is some stuff to adb first ? many thanks !!!

Re Mele boot SD
Username: BarryK
"Nik0, The Mele automatically detects a bootable SD card and boots from it. There is nothing that you have to change.

unmount b4 dd
Username: aarf
"remember to unmount the sd card before using the dd comanding to it. doing it now. hopefully in half hour will have it.

fail
Username: aarf
"Doesnt go past black screen when sdcard is in the slot. Everything seemed to go ok . Including sync. Will be a while before I can face the icafe again to retrace and examine. My ears are too sensitive to suffer repeated doses too soon. My android aurora has crashed/reverted to all chinese so that too is stumbling block

Re: tablet driver for lui
Username: Steev
"On the first partition of the sdcard, there is a file called "evb.bin". You must replace it with your tablet's own script.bin for the LCD to work. script.bin is sort of a hardware config file for Allwinner A10 devices, it sets things like default output device, screen size, memory info, etc. Since the Mele A1000 doesn't have a built-in LCD, it is set to output through HDMI by default. You can extract your device's script.bin while Android is running like this: [code] adb shell mkdir /mnt/nanda adb shell mount -t vfat /dev/block/nanda /mnt/nanda adb pull /mnt/nanda/script.bin evb.bin [/code]

lui booting
Username: aarf
" thanks immensly for this pointer steev . sorry of if i missed this previously. now i need to know how to open a terminal in android 4.0.3 so that i can paste your code. before i commence reams of reading, is it possible to open a terminal without installing anything because the icecream has dropped out of my sandwitch and it now refuses to install anything and reverts to virgin on reboot. i may have to ask in an android forum for the contents of the bin for my aurora. should also make an effort to cajole someone into letting me test their hdmi. i dont have a hdmi cable or tv.

re: lui booting
Username: Steev
"You do not have to install anything on your tablet, those commands should actually be pasted in the terminal on your Linux PC while you have your tablet connected via USB. You will need to have adb installed (comes with the Android SDK). I have uploaded the adb binary here, just put it somewhere in your path (like /usr/local/bin) and make it executable: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-PSbqQESZw9WXlhWHg5N2xLU2M

SD card and Genesi-USA
Username: Raffy
"Just bought a common SD card (brand K**ngston) and the available bytes = 3,896,475,648 with 32,768 bytes used, for a total of 3,896,508,416 bytes. It shows in Win7 as a 3.62GB storage. Take a look at [url=http://www.genesi-usa.com/]these guys - they've done great work for ARMv7.

re hdmi invalid format
Username: BarryK
"Ted Dog, hdmi is an international standard. Someone on the arm-netbook mail list reported the same problem. I don't know what the outcome of that was.

lui progress
Username: aarf
" Steev's code above extracts the evb.bin from aurora, then copied the new eve.bin into mele fat16 partition to replace the original there . booted and a backlight came on followed by a faint grey to blue vertical venitian blind. thats all didnt go past that.:)

Lui sound questions
Username: bosse
"I want to run a mele or another A8 computer as a standalone media player for a exotic surround sound format named Ambisonic. I wonder if Lui is complete enough before comitting to buy a mele. The thing i need is 8 channel HDMI sound via Jack A simple multi channel sound player: http://offog.org/code/potamus.html A Jack based Ambisonic decoder: ambdec http://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/index.html How far from whit nirvana are we? :-)

Resize Screen
Username: Ribuck
"Hi, I just wondered if there is a way to re-size the screen, as it's cropping it quite a bit on my tv, so i can see the screen properly.

.config file
Username: madanadam
"Can you give .config file for this image's kernel? I will recompile with mtd support I need it for restoring my tablet's nandb drive.

Re kernel .config
Username: BarryK
"Look in /etc/modules in the Lui image file.

Re .config
Username: BarryK
"I don't recall, but I must have just used a pre-existing kernel. If you go to the Mele doc/tut pages, somewhere there is a Ubuntu Lucid SD card image, which is what I got, and took the kernel and modules out of it. So, I don't know the .config file, but perhaps the kernel has been configured to have the .config builtin and available in /proc -- you would have to find out how to access that.

Tags: puppy