Posts Tagged ‘boot-loader’
Tuesday, July 5th, 2011
BuBU made significant improvements to the gen8 boot menu, so we’ve decided to make a blog post.
Note that this is still work in progress so you should actually follow (and link to) the boot menu guide on the developer wiki.
http://dev.openaos.org/wiki/SettingUpMultiRootGen8
Most notable recent improvements:
- new advanced menu which appear in OS selection (which lead to a new menu with debugging (serial stuff), recovery, reboot, disable rooted device, disable comcache)
- other important feature is check validity for /file.img if does not exists it shows a list of available *.img under storage and it magically fix the menu.lst with the selected entry
- fixed the touchscreen issue (under debian/other OSes)
- difference between standard and debug is that the menu for serial appears early in initramfs
- for both debug/standard you can switch serial… if you selected NONE initially.. u can go back in advanced menu > DEBUGGING to change to Ether or if u selected Ether you can got to same place to change to Both (or None or whatever)
- Booting off partitions including µSD card partitions
- IPv6 support in kernel
We plan to bring as many features as possible to the gen7 boot menu too in the near future so stay tuned.
Please report all problems on IRC and or to our issue tracker!
Here are the files for the impatient who know what they are doing:
http://www.openaos.org/wp-upload/gen8/2011-07-05/
Tags: a101, a28, a32, a43, a70, boot-loader, boot-menu, gen7, gen8, gpl, Linux kernel, multiboot, multiroot, sde
Posted in gen7, gen8 | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, December 15th, 2010
Here it is:
http://www.archos.com/support/support_tech/updates.html (scroll down to the bottom, click ‘Show’, scroll again, click first button, acknowledge, download)
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A101 showing SDE boot menu – All rights reserved by av500
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A101 showing SDE boot screen – All rights reserved by av500
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A101 running Ångström – All rights reserved by av500
I haven’t tried it yet, but read on that page that it comes with a nice dual-boot menu out of the box! Let’s get it on and run some fun things on those new devices. The scope is all generation 8 Archos Internet Tablets: 28, 32, 43, 70 and 101!
Let’s discuss things on the openAOS-dev mailing list.
Cheers
Thomas
PS: Yes there should have been more/other blog posts, but personally I have a new job and far less time for openAOS than I’d like to at the moment. 
Although my new employer (Tieto Finland) is very supportive of open-source involvement, so in the future things should look better. 
Tags: 101, 28, 32, 43, 70, android, Android 2.2, Ångström, aos, boot-loader, boot-menu, gen8, gpl, Linux kernel, menu, sde, sources, update file
Posted in Ångström, gen8 | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
The plans for this have been quite long in our pipeline but we finally got around to making it happen. As users seem to like to go hence and forth between different Archos firmware versions we were often asked to make this easier. (You have to mount the hidden partition, copy the files, etc. – quite a hassle, especially if you don’t have an Linux PC at hand at the time)
So what we have done now is that before we display the boot menu we also check if the directory ‘openaos/update‘ exists on the FAT32 partition (this is X:\openaos\update for you Windows people). If this is the case then we take everything¹ that is in that directory and copy it over to the hidden partition! Presto! Your Gen6 device just changed its firmware!
This way you can easily switch between e.g. firmware 1.6.54 and 1.7.11 . Some people told us that they do this because of certain features working better on the respective firmware.
All you have to do is install this initramfs together with an regular openAOS zImage like e.g. this from kevin’s r199. You can do this from the SDE menu in Recovery mode.
enjoy!
Thomas, your friendly neighborhood ArchDruid
PS: This comes also handy if you just installed SDE and flashed those two; as during the update procedure it will create the menu.lst correctly and add an AVOS entry if necessary!
¹ Everything in this context means the *cramfs.secure files, the lang* files and the upselling directory of an unpacked firmware. While only the cramfs files are really important in our opinion. – For unpacking firmwares look for ‘aos-tools’.
Tags: archos5, archos7, boot-loader, boot-menu, gen6, multiboot, multiroot, sde, update file
Posted in gen6 | No Comments »
Monday, July 12th, 2010
UPDATE:
This guide is outdated, please do not use it anymore! There is a new and updated procedure that is easy to follow and integrates g_serial debugging. The files linked to in this guide will be no longer available.
I’ve been talking about this idea for a while now, but today I finally had the right mood to work on it and I think I’ve found a sufficiently flexible solution for now.
I’m loading the kernel modules (musb_hdrc and g_serial) in the initramfs. Fortunately there was enough space left for that.
I’ve created 3 separate serial interfaces using g_serial.
- /dev/ttyGS0 – unused (root shell on Archos Android firmware)
- /dev/ttyGS1 – unused
- /dev/ttyGS2 – kernel messages. this is simply ‘cat /proc/kmsg’
You can now attach terminals or logs to this in your images. Usually by editing /etc/inittab and adding a line like:
s2:235:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --autologin root ttyGS0
If you need to disable this you can just kill the ‘cat’ process and if running stop the getty’s. After doing that you can remove the g_serial and then the musb_hdrc module. You can then e.g. reload musb_hdrc to have it act as a host controller again.
The important changes are in the initramfs. The zImage is only needed if you want the root shell for Android. Get the files here.
Enjoy your easy debugging! No need for serial dongles anymore!
Cheers
Thomas, your friendly neighborhood ArchDruid
PS: As a bonus this zImage will boot Archos 2.0.x firmwares. There will be some problems with transparencies though. We’re going to fix that in the long run though.
PPS: If there is demand I can generate a set for gen6 too.
Tags: android, Ångström, archos5it, archos7, boot-loader, boot-menu, build, console, gadget, gen6, gen7, gpl, hack, Linux kernel, menu, multiboot, musb, RS-232, RS232, sde, serial
Posted in Ångström, ArchDruid, gen6, gen7 | 5 Comments »
Thursday, April 1st, 2010
If you’re wondering why there is no working boot menu yet. I can tell you. Things are stalled since shortly after my last post. I found the problem and ran into the next one. But this time it proves to be a tough one:
init: can't open '/dev/null': No such file or directory
Looks totally innocent. But trust me I checked each and every file-system involved and they all have a /dev/null device node. I’ve tried countless things. Also rebuilt the kernel with an almost identical CMDLINE like the Archos kernel. Nope.
My last hope is that I can build a zImage from a patchset for the linux kernel source I have recieved from Archos (thanks!). Maybe that will finally and magically work… but for now I’m calling it a day and will try that tomorrow.
PS: On an unrelated note. Looks like we’re going to have WiFi working on gen7 soon. Got it working today but now have to wait for the patches I received to be open sourced. If somebody wants to play with binaries I might be able to give those away right now. Just contact me on IRC.
Tags: boot-loader, boot-menu, build, fail, gen7, gpl, multiboot, multiroot, sources
Posted in gen7 | No Comments »