Posts Tagged ‘fail’

No Android / Ångström boot menu yet for gen7

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.

Archos gen7 GPL sources and Buildroot – random ramblings and notes

Friday, March 19th, 2010

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.