Archos gen7 GPL sources and Buildroot – random ramblings and notes

As I’m currently working on the boot process of gen7 devices (aka A5IT or A5S) I found myself in the need to rebuild the busybox binary that is shipped in the initramdisk of the regular firmware.

So well it should be just downloading the gen7-gpl tarball, unpacking, make and there it should be, right? – Sadly it isn’t, but as far as I understand Archos doesn’t get to be blamed for all the problems but one.

So after unpacking, going into the buildroot directory and issuing make – it fails. Because the make I have on my Debian system and on the openSuse system does not understand includes. Fix:
# cp local/g6_arm/g6_arm.config .config

Now the build process would continue, but fail on header preparation of some buildroot supplied kernel (I’m told Archos has their own kernel in there too, why they didn’t disable that one? – I don’t know) with:
scripts/unifdef.c:209: error: conflicting types for ‘getline’
It would work on my openSuse 11.1 installation though.

Later on it also failed somewhere in ltrace-0.5 but thanks to hints I received I was able to finally make it build completely by issuing:
# BR_JLEVEL=1 make

Oh and the busybox binary I got was not the one used in the initrd. That’s the only Archos failure, they seem to have forgotten to include the config to build the initrd… I’m currently waiting to receive that.

Bottom line: If you want to build the Archos GPL sources you better use an older release of ubuntu or openSuse. Also Archos needs to work on their GPL source QA.

update: received a patch adding g7_recovery. Trying that now.

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4 Responses to “Archos gen7 GPL sources and Buildroot – random ramblings and notes”

  1. arnoo says:

    Hi!
    Thanks for this project…you will be our Geohot!!
    arno

  2. Ian58 says:

    Hello,

    I post this message to support you in your project. It’s nice to know that people like you are working on the Archos 5 IT ;-)
    Thank you again & again.

    Ian58

  3. Al Sutton says:

    Which Debian version were you using?, I tried Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and it similar problems.

    There also seemed to be a lot of similarities between the gen6 and gen7 kernel GPL code kernel customisations, so if you get a full build it might be worth trying it on a gen6 device for curiosities sake :) .

    • tbr says:

      I’m mostly using Debian testing. For my tests I tried Ubuntu 7.04 too. The only more or less successful build of that environment was on an OpenSuse 11.1 vserver.

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