Dear Vagrant, First of all, thank you very much for answering to my question.
On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 4:52 PM, Vagrant Cascadian <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2017-04-28, Rogério Brito wrote: >> Anyway, revisiting this device, I am interested in getting any more >> modern operating system on it and, of course, Debian is my first >> choice. Does anybody here have any experience with this kind of system >> or something similar? If yes, how have things evolved in the last 4 >> years? Is it too painful to install Debian on it? > > It looks like there's at least a devicetree for it in linux: > > arch/arm/boot/dts/imx6q-gk802.dts: model = "Zealz GK802"; > arch/arm/boot/dts/imx6q-gk802.dts: compatible = "zealz,imx6q-gk802", > "fsl,imx6q"; > > Several of the drivers (hdmi, microsd, usb-otg, internal usb) are > marked as: status = "okay"; > > The .dtb is present in the linux 4.9.x linux-image-4.9.0-2-armmp > package. There are several other imx6 devices supported in debian's > armhf kernels, so the necessary drivers *might* already be enabled. > That all sounds reasonably promising. Thanks a lot for all these status updates. I must say that I'm completely lost in this sea of ARM hardware, with so many variants, so many (unofficial) kernel trees (and that's not even counting the Android trees that I just started to learn about, with the intention of getting a more updated version of Android also working on this device). I really appreciate this help of yours. PowerPC like Macs are super easy in comparison. > So, your task will be to figure out how to get the bootloader that comes > with it (or port it to a modern u-boot) to load Debian's kernel, > initramfs and the appropriate .dtb file. I experimented with things a bit during these past few days and I got the following results/pieces of information: * This device boots from a microSD card, which makes things considerably lower risk in comparison with other devices, which means that, in the worst case, I can just wipe the microsd card and start over. * Ignoring the Android image that came with it (and which has 9 partitions!), the only other working image that I got was the one provided by [1], which was supposed to be a Debian 7 netinstall image. It worked up to a point where, retrieving the packages from the network, there was a segfault and I didn't pursue things further. [1]: http://projectgus.com/2013/05/debian-installer-for-zealz-gk802-android-tv-quad-core-arm-minipc/ This image has a very peculiar layout: * The image is a regular MBR partition table (not UEFI), created with sfdisk. * The u-boot binary that was used was put starting at 1KB from the beginning of the image, in *an unpartitioned* area before the beginning of the first partition. (The android image also had many gaps between partitions, when I inspected it with gparted). * The first real partition starts at 1MB from the beginning of the image. * The contents of this real partition are only 3 things: a script for uboot, a kernel image (a 3.0.x kernel, if memory serves correctly) and an initrd that contains the netinstall parts. Given all this information and the sea of the images and files in [2], I'm a bit lost here on which method I should pursue further. [2]: http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/installer-armhf/current/images/hd-media/SD-card-images/README.concatenateable_images Should I use these hd-media images (creating one for my device---but I don't know what I should include in the potential "firmware.gk802.img.gz", if that is the way to go) or should I use another method, like the one given in [3]. [3]: http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/installer-armhf/current/images/u-boot/MX6_Cubox-i/ Do you have any advice? > You'll probably want to figure out how to connect to the serial > console... Hopefully, this is not needed... Yet. :-) >> I can provide some details with respect to the hardware and document >> my experiences and the installation process somewhere for reference of >> others (kind of what Martin did with some systems on his personal >> page) with the ultimate goal of getting it working well with Linux. > > There are pages for various devices on: > > https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/ Excellent. I will wait until I have success to report the results there. Thanks, -- Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA http://cynic.cc/blog/ : github.com/rbrito : profiles.google.com/rbrito DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br
