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.
