Archlinuxarm On C3x00

[greguu]

Danboid,

great you got the keymap working.

you can download the firmware package manually and may be able to install it using pacman -U

still, I will put in some effort to get an updated kernel going and add any needed drivers.

The zaurus is a dying platform, but I will keep it going until my Z hardware dies.

Cheers!

[danboid]

Dying? It died almost a decade ago!

Weedy as its specs may be today, the fact remains we can still run modern software on it and thats one of the main reasons I bought it. I'd say the Z makes a better pocket SSH client than any of the latest gen smartphones because of its hardware keyboard so its still very useful to us techies.

I think its a shame that, apart from the Pandora which I don't think is available any more either, there hasn't been anything to supercede the Z for pocket Linux boxes. The Pyra should be out soon but I won't buy one unless Imagination release a fully-functional, open source X driver for their PVR GPUs. I can't believe they went that route when it could've used Tegra or Adreno.

[greguu]

Dying? It died almost a decade ago!

Weedy as its specs may be today, the fact remains we can still run modern software on it and thats one of the main reasons I bought it. I'd say the Z makes a better pocket SSH client than any of the latest gen smartphones because of its hardware keyboard so its still very useful to us techies.

I think its a shame that, apart from the Pandora which I don't think is available any more either, there hasn't been anything to supercede the Z for pocket Linux boxes. The Pyra should be out soon but I won't buy one unless Imagination release a fully-functional, open source X driver for their PVR GPUs. I can't believe they went that route when it could've used Tegra or Adreno.

You got a point there, it is dead already, we are the last souls to keep it alive.

Also I agree, as a pocket ssh client, it is still useful and more secure compared to android devices.

Saying this, lets focus on one thing. Keep the Z alive , with ALARM.

I appreciate a tester and user a like you. hopefully there might be more joining us with their Z!!

Cheers.

[danboid]

It looks like there is a good chance you were the first to run Arch on the Z and I'm the second? I'm prob the first to run it on the C3000. Maybe there are a few others who'll show up and some will have just wanted some 'adventurous' types like us to go first? Others might try it after reading my reports of its greatly improved performance and modernity over say pdaXrom?

Do you think there is a chance the Z (or at least the C3x00 series) could become a supported platform for ALARM? Have you talked to them about this already? There are prob as many Z C3x00 owners as there are say Pogoplug owners, which is supported, so it could happen on that basis. I've seen ArchiMark has brought this up on their forum but the lead ALARM dev dismissed it on the grounds that Mark didn't think we had a recent enough kernel to run systemd but that's obviously not true and hasn't been for a few years at least, according to you.

[ArchiMark]

It looks like there is a good chance you were the first to run Arch on the Z and I'm the second? I'm prob the first to run it on the C3000. Maybe there are a few others who'll show up and some will have just wanted some 'adventurous' types like us to go first? Others might try it after reading my reports of its greatly improved performance and modernity over say pdaXrom?

Do you think there is a chance the Z (or at least the C3x00 series) could become a supported platform for ALARM? Have you talked to them about this already? There are prob as many Z C3x00 owners as there are say Pogoplug owners, which is supported, so it could happen on that basis. I've seen ArchiMark has brought this up on their forum but the lead ALARM dev dismissed it on the grounds that Mark didn't think we had a recent enough kernel to run systemd but that's obviously not true and hasn't been for a few years at least, according to you.

Are you saying I said we didn't have a recent enough kernel or are you referring to another Mark?

Anyway, congrats on getting Arch running......

If I can get a few programs I want built with OBSD, then I might stick with it.....otherwise, might join you guys on Arch.....although I'd probably want X working if I do...

Will follow your progress here.....

Meanwhile I'm building OBSD packages.....

 

[danboid]

Yep - I meant you of course - unless there are two Zaurus users called ArchiMark doing the rounds?

http://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=7746

I'm not having much luck getting my PLANEX wifi working so far. Hopefully the SparkLAN will be easier to get going as I can't really do much until I can get pacman (and pacaur / packer etc) working - well not without significant pain manually copying and installing hundreds of pkg files from their repos although some might prefer that to multi-day build marathons.

I should mention before I forget that I had to add a line into fstab:

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/dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults,rw,relatime 0 1
Otherwise the root drive gets mounted read only.

vi under D+B was playing up so I had to add that line by running:

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echo "/dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults,rw,relatime 0 1" >> /etc/fstab

[ArchiMark]

OK, I get it now.....

Reading that thread, I was reacting to the info supplied by the person responding to my post. Based upon that info, I didn't think we'd meet the requirements...

Glad to see that was not correct....

Hope you get pacman running......

Will keep reading about Arch progress here.....

Something to do while I'm building OBSD packages.....  

[danboid]

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poweroff
Seems to be the only clean and reliable way to shut down the Z under Arch, vs using halt or shutdown.

If I'm lucky my 32GB CF (which cost me £15 inc. postage) and new wifi card should be arriving today although I don't think I'll be able to use the wifii until dallnroti gets the new kernel uploaded or I build one myself of course. I think I can wait!

Excluding your tweak to get the power LED to indicate the kernels heartbeat, have you applied any custom patches to your kernel or is it all mainlined, upstream code daalnroti?

[greguu]

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poweroff
Seems to be the only clean and reliable way to shut down the Z under Arch, vs using halt or shutdown.

If I'm lucky my 32GB CF (which cost me £15 inc. postage) and new wifi card should be arriving today although I don't think I'll be able to use the wifii until dallnroti gets the new kernel uploaded or I build one myself of course. I think I can wait!

Excluding your tweak to get the power LED to indicate the kernels heartbeat, have you applied any custom patches to your kernel or is it all mainlined, upstream code daalnroti?

The 3.11.3 kernel has follwing patches :

Power LED => cpu heartbeat
HDD LED => disk activity ( needed to be patches, vanilla kernel does not show HDD activity )
USB  => increased max power to 180mA ( _may_ work to get some USB sicks running )
BOOT => some boot hang fix that happenend with 3.x kenels

thats about it.

I will have rebuild 3.11.3 kernel ready this afternoon, containing all USB / CF WiFi drivers, no heartbeat LED and no boot logo.

The 3.18 series did not boot from a vanilla kernel and I will need to troubleshoot later this week. Possibly some patches required.

Cheers!

[greguu]

If you want to overclock, you can try to add

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pxa27x_maxfreq=624 to your kernel parameters and see if you can get a higher clock rate.
I have not played with it under ALARM.

[greguu]

new release 3.11.3 kernel

[ArchiMark]

Hi daalnroti

Enjoy reading about progress and updates with Arch.....

Haven't given up on OpenBSD yet, still building programs....

But if I do decide to try Arch, will your files work with my 3200?

Thanks,

Mark

[greguu]

Hi daalnroti

Enjoy reading about progress and updates with Arch.....

Haven't given up on OpenBSD yet, still building programs....

But if I do decide to try Arch, will your files work with my 3200?

Thanks,

Mark

I can not confirm, but I am confident that C3200 will work.

[ArchiMark]

Hi daalnroti

Enjoy reading about progress and updates with Arch.....

Haven't given up on OpenBSD yet, still building programs....

But if I do decide to try Arch, will your files work with my 3200?

Thanks,

Mark

I can not confirm, but I am confident that C3200 will work.

Understand.....thanks for your input...

[greguu]

These are some examples to help you going. No guarantee these work in all circumstances. Just as a guideline.

Kexecboot :

Create a file boot.cfg in /boot on you ALARM partition if you need a boot menu entry for dual boot etc.
Make sure to change your root= entry to match your setup.

Example:

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LABEL=ArchLinux
KERNEL=/boot/zImage-3.11.3-c3x00
APPEND=root=/dev/sda3 rootfstype=ext3 fbcon=rotate:1 noinitrd loglevel=3 pxa27x_maxfreq=624

LABEL=Debian
KERNEL=/boot/zImage-2.6.36-rc3
APPEND=console=ttyS0,115200n8 root=/dev/hda1 rootfstype=ext3 console=tty1 noinitrd  fbcon=rotate:1  debug dyntick=enable
fstab :

Make sure to change to your file system type,  and root device /dev/hdax etc

Example:

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/dev/hda3               /               ext3 noatime,nodiratime,commit=600,reservation,defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1