Bodhi Linux with Enlightenment desktop RFS working on mk908

[biemster]

Hi All,


The rootfs for armhf of Bodhi Linux is working out of the box on my mk908 (except wifi ofcourse):

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bodhilinux/files/ARMHF/rootfs/

The Enlightenment desktop is very resource efficient, so maybe the perfect desktop for this stick. Check it out if you feel like it, by following the excellent guides available on how to boot from SD.

cheers,
Lars

[sevo1984]

Hi All,


The rootfs for armhf of Bodhi Linux is working out of the box on my mk908 (except wifi ofcourse):

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bodhilinux/files/ARMHF/rootfs/

The Enlightenment desktop is very resource efficient, so maybe the perfect desktop for this stick. Check it out if you feel like it, by following the excellent guides available on how to boot from SD.

cheers,
Lars

Hi there and thanks for sharing your experience.
I am interested what kernel are you using?
I also have an mk908v1 but it appears to be have been widely neglected by the rk linux developers.
The only working kernel for me is mmm123's 1.1.1
Cheers

[biemster]

I am interested what kernel are you using?

I compiled my own kernel from tyeo098 sources:

https://github.com/tyeo098/Rockchip-GPL-Kernel

I did change the config he uses to compile the framebuffer as modules.

Then I used the ramdisk from this recovery by Sin Huang (this recovery worked too for bodhi IIRC, try this first before compiling kernel yourself maybe?):
ftp://dl.gizfun.com/mk908-linux-reco...3.0.72.tar.bz2

Then I put the fb modules I compiled myself in this ramdisk and put both kernel and ramdisk in recovery.img

That was all, feel free to ask for links to the tools and commands if needed (I'm on OSX though, but the tools should work on linux too).

good luck!

[sevo1984]

I compiled my own kernel from tyeo098 sources:

https://github.com/tyeo098/Rockchip-GPL-Kernel

I did change the config he uses to compile the framebuffer as modules.

Then I used the ramdisk from this recovery by Sin Huang (this recovery worked too for bodhi IIRC, try this first before compiling kernel yourself maybe?):
ftp://dl.gizfun.com/mk908-linux-reco...3.0.72.tar.bz2

Then I put the fb modules I compiled myself in this ramdisk and put both kernel and ramdisk in recovery.img

That was all, feel free to ask for links to the tools and commands if needed (I'm on OSX though, but the tools should work on linux too).

good luck!

Hey and thanks for your quick reply!

I see that you are using 3.0.72 sources, would you mind sharing your experience, does it offer any practical advantage over 3.0.36?

Also, I did try playing with building a kernel (at least managed to have a 720p working which is great for my poor eye sight, but never got to the stage of compiling ap6210 and rkwifi modules from sources. Somehow"
make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi- modules
and
make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi- modules_install

do not produce these two modules whatever source and config combination I tried (of course I have them enabled as by replacing "=yes" with "=m".
In my case and with my very limited knowledge this is the only way to keep playng, since, as a total amateur my absolute maximum would be to have modules inserted into mmm123's initrd, edit "init" script to insmod them, and then produce cpio for makebootimg). Any ideas?

And btw, do you also have v1 stick?

[biemster]

I see that you are using 3.0.72 sources, would you mind sharing your experience, does it offer any practical advantage over 3.0.36?

I don't think there are any practical advantages, I remember omegamoon writing he moved to 72 to provide a common source for all of us to base future development on.

Also, I did try playing with building a kernel (at least managed to have a 720p working which is great for my poor eye sight, but never got to the stage of compiling ap6210 and rkwifi modules from sources. Somehow"
make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi- modules
and
make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi- modules_install

do not produce these two modules whatever source and config combination I tried (of course I have them enabled as by replacing "=yes" with "=m".
In my case and with my very limited knowledge this is the only way to keep playng, since, as a total amateur my absolute maximum would be to have modules inserted into mmm123's initrd, edit "init" script to insmod them, and then produce cpio for makebootimg). Any ideas?

I still have to work on wifi, my plan of attack is to first try this (precompiled modules):

http://www.rikomagic.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=15102&f=2#p15102

although I'm a bit worried I'll get version mismatch errors.
In the future I'll also go to compiling them myself, I'll keep you posted how that works (could take a while though).

And btw, do you also have v1 stick?

I did not open mine yet, but I ordered it quite recently so I'm guessing v3.

Which kernel sources are you using?
How is the recovery by Sin Huang working for you?

[sevo1984]

I don't think there are any practical advantages, I remember omegamoon writing he moved to 72 to provide a common source for all of us to base future development on.


I still have to work on wifi, my plan of attack is to first try this (precompiled modules):

http://www.rikomagic.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=15102&f=2#p15102

although I'm a bit worried I'll get version mismatch errors.
In the future I'll also go to compiling them myself, I'll keep you posted how that works (could take a while though).


I did not open mine yet, but I ordered it quite recently so I'm guessing v3.

Which kernel sources are you using?
How is the recovery by Sin Huang working for you?

Hi Lars and thanks for your thorough reply!
It must be v.3, mine is almost 6 months old, in the meantime, v2 was released (with external antena), then v3. It seems they all have slightly different boards, v3 in particular, judging at least by android forums discussion.
I am using Alok's sources to keep compatibility with mmm123 config, as it was the one he recommended, and this kernel is the only one I use without any major issues (without the wifi though). Tried other sources too in order to figure out how to produce 6210 module, no success as yet. In the meantime, I use my own debootstrapped Precise with unity (which won't run on later ubuntu releases without hw accelaration anyway). And of course, Roline USB lan adapter takes care of the rest.
And yes, I did come across the rkwifi.ko link you provided, it was used by someone on v.1 board, but haven't tried inserting it into my recovery kernel (I believe it is an android module?)
Will try Sin Huang's recovery and let you know how it went on, but it is not going to be quite informative to you as, v3 is a different hardware.
And most interesting of all, did some google search on ap6210, it does not appear anywhere under Broadcom products, but seems to be related (derived) from its bcm4330 hardware. At least that is my understanding at this stage
Will keep you posted too.
Regards, Goran

[maxchen]

Great!
I tried it, but I only got a command line premote, start enlightenment fail.I only need to run linux ,so I install a working Picuntu in my mk908 v3 from this link http://www.freaktab.com/showthread.p...l=1#post103556, and put bodhi linux in sd card, copy modules from the working picuntu in tu sd_card/lib/modules .

How can I make it work? Thanks

[knawnd]

Bodhi drops official ARMHF support

It's good that the number of linux distribution ported to be run on our ARM devices is growing. But according Bodhi official news they drop official ARMHF support:

Bodhi drops official ARMHF support

October 24th 2013

Effective immediately Bodhi is dropping official support for ARM devices. What does this mean?

We will no longer be advertising an ARMHF download link on our front page Updates to ARM images will be infrequent/not at all The ARM repo will be slow to receive package updates

The primary reason for this change is that maintaining ARM images is alot of work for very little return. Keeping one ARM image up to date is more work than maintaining all three of our desktop disc images. Every ARM image is used far less than any one of our desktop releases, so it just isn't worth the investment. A secondary reason for this is the closed source nature of ARM hardware. It is near impossible to get ARM hardware fully functional under a normal Linux distribution in a reasonable amount of time. Often by the time we get all the kinks worked out the hardware is so old it isn't truly useful any longer. We will continue to maintain an ARM discussion forum here. Users are free to ask questions about the existing images we have there (or post their own). I do hope to try and maintain ARMHF packages for E17 in our repo for Debian Wheezy moving forward still - but these updates will come slower than the desktop repos get updates.

Regards,
~Jeff Hoogland

[knawnd]

ALT linux

Sorry if someone could consider my post as offtopic but let me share my experience in searching desktop linux distro for my ARM-based device (Minix Neo x7).
There are some deb-based linux distro (e.g. picuntu) what are running pretty good. But I prefer rpm-based one since I am much more experienced with such ones. On all my x86* CPU desktop PC and laptops I use OpenSUSE. I could run it (OpenSUSE 13.1) on my arm device too but I had been disappointed soon because of poor set of desktop packages provided (firefox, thunderbird, LibreOffice are still not available for ARM arch). So I continued my search and re-discovered ALT linux distro (some years ago I had tried it already but was not fully satisfied). There is Simply Linux branch for ALT linux distro which has ARM v7 arch support and provides a pretty good set of packages for desktop including ones I mentioned above. Simply linux supports Cubox (Marvell Armada 510 CPU based) "out-of-the-box". It was pretty easy to run it on Minix Neo x7 based on RK3188. Although Simply Linux rootfs provided for Cubox is focused on XFCE I had no problem to switched to LXDE (there is Enlightenment DE available as well).
If someone is interested in I can share my quick howto on running Simply linux with LXDE on Minix Neo x7.

[biemster]

Great!
I tried it, but I only got a command line premote, start enlightenment fail.I only need to run linux ,so I install a working Picuntu in my mk908 v3 from this link http://www.freaktab.com/showthread.p...l=1#post103556, and put bodhi linux in sd card, copy modules from the working picuntu in tu sd_card/lib/modules .

How can I make it work? Thanks

What kernel are you using? Can you try it with the recovery from post #3?
I did not touch the root fs at all. I remember reading somewhere that you have to copy all the files as root to preserve permissions (but I'm not even sure if I did that), maybe you can try that?

[biemster]

It's good that the number of linux distribution ported to be run on our ARM devices is growing. But according Bodhi official news they drop official ARMHF support:

Sadly that is true. But maybe if it becomes popular on those android sticks they will have a large enough user base on armhf and consider supporting it again?

[jointherealms]

Hey, im not sure why you guys dont have wifi. i compiled a kernel for the v1 board and wifi works fine. Only thing is i forgot to remove paranoid android network from the config so you have to add your user to inet and net_raw groups

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2x51avpm97hmos4/kernel.img

[maxchen]

What kernel are you using? Can you try it with the recovery from post #3?
I did not touch the root fs at all. I remember reading somewhere that you have to copy all the files as root to preserve permissions (but I'm not even sure if I did that), maybe you can try that?

Thanks, I tried that recovery and it work! And I also use the riwifi.ko module from picuntu for mk908 v3, work too.But I have trouble with running qt software.
Anyway, thanks again.

[sevo1984]

Hey, im not sure why you guys dont have wifi. i compiled a kernel for the v1 board and wifi works fine. Only thing is i forgot to remove paranoid android network from the config so you have to add your user to inet and net_raw groups

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2x51avpm97hmos4/kernel.img

Sounds great, will try it today!
Would you mind sharing with us your config plse.
Thanks!