On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 12:59 PM, Jeremiah C. Foster <[email protected]> wrote:
> Which do you recommend then for "board bringup" with Debian? personally? absolutely none of them. reason: they all create a 1gbyte+ pre-installed pre-option-chosen absolutely-zero-configuration-option root filesystem. which is complete madness when there's a perfectly good system already in place called "debian installer" which, in its minimalist form (netboot) weighs in at approximately 5mbyte. if you're going to spend *any* time at all help make it easier to create debian-installers for arm systems. > I rarely have problems getting a board to run, I usually stuff an > Ubuntu kernel and then use debbootstrap, but if there was a way to add > a Debian kernel I'd be on that in a New York minute. > Right now > cross-compilation is painful be it in a chroot or with Yocto, so if I > could stay in an all Debian environment I'd be much more comfortable. i've said it once and i'll say it a thousand times: the reason why all these systems are hard to bring up is because of the hard-wired options in each and every device which you CANNOT code around. every single system flooding out of china is COMPLETELY different from every single other device and there IS no common ground between them. so unless someone has gone to the trouble of doing the kernel-level bring-up and u-boot-level bring-up (which often involves that cross-compilation that you mention) then you have absolutely no other choice but to do some form of reverse-engineering to get it. so i keep on having to tell people this: we get people on a regular basis on debian-arm "how can i put debian on random low-cost tablet hardware brand X from china i bought" and these people with absolutely no programming experience whatsoever basically have to be told "you need to learn programming and then go one step beyond that and become a reverse-engineer" which is complete madness but is the hard truth. with A10 devices it's a *little* easier because there's this thing which is very similar to device-tree called "script.fex" that, basically, means you don't have to recompile the kernel (or u-boot), you can just edit a file with a layout similar to config.ini [*1] but unfortunately you get stuck with some rather odd choices for drivers, and you also get stuck with an _android_ kernel. so one solution is basically this: find some specific devices of particular types (tablet, laptop, e-reader, tv box), get a group buy together, do the reverse-engineering and publish the results. then, when someone comes on the list and says "i bought tablet/laptop/box X can you help me get debian on it" it will be possible to say to them "sell it on ebay or return it and get one of these brand Y ones instead". l. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/capweedxvgigvgw3h9x-hj+kk4569rdqky7hxnvw_ylbtq9i...@mail.gmail.com
