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’.