Puppy running on Mele A1000!

Yes! Here is the very first screen-shot, to prove it:



This is built from Ubuntu Lucid Lynx armel binary packages, plus an assortment of PETs that I compiled (see recent blog posts).

Two things that are broken, that I am aware of:

1. urxvt
At first I used the 'urxvt-lite' DEB, but it complained could not find a font and aborted. Then I compiled my own rxvt-unicode, but that reported that it cannot "initialize pseudo-tty" and aborted.

2. jwm tray
Jwm is running, but not the tray. Probably the .jwmrc file is broken.

These will be fixed, for sure. But I thought that I would announce this significant event.

The way that I intend to distribute this (when get to releasing it), is as an SD card image. Compressed, it will be quite small.

Creating an SD image from scratch is rather difficult, so I have taken the easy way out. If you look here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/arm/sd-skeleton-images/

...the Woof '1download' script will download the one you want. These skeleton images are intended to be for whatever ARM board you want to build for, you choose the appropriate one.

Then, the '3builddistro' script only has to add the kernel and Puppy files to the SD card, and it is all ready to go.

Apart from the above bugs, a bit of coding to do in Woof, but I hope to have something released very soon.

---

Comments

Bravo
Username: lobster
Good news. :happy: I had a go at compiling some of the ARM 6 pets on the Raspberry Pi. Will again. I find it rather overwhelming. Simple in theory but . . . Major achievement. Bravo!

Monitor resolution?
Username: Jota
"Great!! Does it use the full native monitor resolution?

Congrats!
Username: maxerro
"Some guess-fixes since I can't extract (or mount) .img on this machine currently: 1. ~/.Xdefaults: urxvt.font: xft:Nimbus Mono L:style=Regular:pixelsize=14 !urxvt.font: x:7x14,xft:mono (or URxvt.font: ... compile-dependent) 2. Minimal task&dock tray for jwm (~/.jwmrc-tray): <JWM><Tray y="-1" height="32"><TaskList/><Dock/></Tray></JWM>

monitor or tv?
Username: Adi
"Monitor resolution? I think that a tv resolution is in question... What is more suitable for this kind of platforms monitors or tvs? It will be nice to have a computer with 25 $! Waitning for puppy tablets.

My my
Username: Raffy
"My, oh my, Puppy finds a new home - a Set Top Box. Thanks for the hard work, Barry. :)

Img Size
Username: Ted Dog
"What sized SD card would we need for Mele Pup-Droid, have a 1G card for my camera, and a 4G card on order? This is just wow!

urxvt Problem
Username: Dougal
"Barry, I think you don't have /dev/pts mounted... (u)rxvt is old and thus depends on those PseudoTerminalSlaves. Besides that, linux.com has something about Yocto and apparently you can use it to build a distro even if you don't have the HW, as they have an ARM emulator: https://www.linux.com/news/embedded-mobile/mobile-linux/571345-getting-started-with-yoctos-12-release (that might be better than trying a T2 build... and you can build on a desktop machine, which might be faster.)

More news
Username: BarryK
"[b]urxvt[/b] Dougal, The /dev/pts directory did not exist, so it failed to mount. I am using the kernel that Tom provided, so it is not "puppified". At bootup, a f.s. gets mounted on /dev/, which wipes out my static entries in /dev -- is it the kernel config that sets that? I created directory /dev/pts, rebooted and urxvt worked. [b]Bootup[/b] Not accurately timed, I justed counted up, time from pressing power-on button to desktop loaded is about 18 seconds. Pretty good hey! [b]Gtkdialog[/b] I have just noticed another bug. Running gtkdialog based apps, the widgets render "reverse order". What I mean, is the reverse order vertically and horizontally. So, an OK button that would normally render bottom-right of a window, now renders top-left. It makes the windows look weird. Any ideas? Note, Lucid has GTK 2.20.0. [b]Resolution[/b] A currently limitation with the kernel video driver is it is 720p only. So Puppy is displaying at 1280x720. Also, we don't have a GPU X driver yet, only running the framebuffer X driver. [b]TV/monitor[/b] I am using a TV, HDMI. The Mele has both HDMI and VGA outputs, but I don't know if the VGA is working yet.

SATA hard drive
Username: BarryK
"Today I purchased a SATA laptop (2.5 inch) hard drive, WD 500GB. I bought it locally, from a place called NetPlus, for AU $89. Raffy very kindly offered to buy me one online, however, the local price is very good, so I went and bought it. Anyway, Raffy, thanks for the kind thought! This is now a reasonable compile environment. Only 512MB RAM, but with a swap partition on the HD that will give acceptable performance.

Changing resolution
Username: Steev
"I am able to change the default output device and resolution by editing my device's sys_config1.fex. e.g. for VGA 1024x768 I use: screen0_output_type = 4 screen0_output_mode = 4 Or for HDMI 1080p 60Hz: screen0_output_type = 3 screen0_output_mode = 10 The comments in sys_config1.fex show what these values mean. [code] ;---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ;disp init configuration ; ;screenx_output_type (0:none; 1:lcd; 2:tv; 3:hdmi; 4:vga) ;screenx_output_mode (used for tv/hdmi output, 0:480i 1:576i 2:480p 3:576p 4:720p50 5:720p60 6:1080i50 7:1080i60 8:1080p24 9:1080p50 10:1080p60 11:pal 14:ntsc) ;screenx_output_mode (used for vga output, 0:1680*1050 1:1440*900 2:1360*768 3:1280*1024 4:1024*768 5:800*600 6:640*480 10:1920*1080 11:1280*720) ;---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [/code] After modifying the file, compile it with the 'script' tool and push it to your device. (This guide shows how http://elinux.org/Hack_A10_devices#Get_a_console)

Re resolution
Username: BarryK
"Steev, Thanks for that info. I have been having a problem with understanding some of the basic concepts, such as when people have referred to "script.bin" on the arm-netbook mail-list. Documentation is there, but scattered all over the place. The arm-netbook guys are trying to encourage stuff to go into their wiki. I read something and think that is a useful bit of knowledge, then later on can't find it. So, I have decided to get myself more organized, and I am now bunging everything I find, with url reference, into my NoteCase database -- this is my personal record of what I do with Puppy Linux, NoteCase is a hierarchical notes organiser, to be found in all puppies. later on, I will be in a better position to be able to contribute to online docs.

correction
Username: guiguid
"Hi, Barry ! I think there is a typo mistake here : http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/arm/sd-skeleton-images/README-MELE-UBUNTU-SD-IMG.txt -> So the write operation will now be: -> dd if=/dev/sdb of=mele-ubuntu-lucid-sd4g.img bs=1024 count=3863632 It should be : -> So the write operation will now be: -> dd if=mele-ubuntu-lucid-sd4g.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1024 count=3863632 Very nice works ! Is an <1G SCDARD partition + secondary partion size in function of the SD card planned ?

changing output at runtime
Username: diegorov
"You can do, with a simple program. There are some version at those links: http://www.people4embedded.com/how-to-create-your-own-debian-ubuntu-image-for-mele-a1000-allwinner-a10-based-stb/ http://tsemsb.blogspot.it/2012/07/enabling-composite-video-on-mele-a1000.html

Tags: puppy