Hello,

I've just received an Efika MX smartbook (last Friday actually). It's come installed with ubuntu "maverick" (2.6.31.14). I'm hoping that somebody can help with the few basic queries I have at this time:

1. The system has a MicroSD card slot. Is it possible to boot the system from a MicroSD card (assuming that there is appropriate OS installed). It's not clear to me how to get a u-boot prompt/menu on the system. As soon as it's powered on, it boots from the internal "drive" and apparently ignores the MicroSD card (I've been reading http://blog.efikamx.info/2010/09/maveri ... rnels.html to determine how to prep the card).

2. The smartbook package included a small adaptor which appears to be a serial port. But it's not obvious whether this can even be attached to the smartbook (unless I've really lost the plot here).

Cheers,

Gabor

You need to make a small boot script that provokes U-Boot to try and access kernels from the MicroSD slot. We are prepping a new U-Boot update which will make this much easier, better wait a week for that.

In the meantime, I must say I have never attempted to boot from the MicroSD card slot this way so it may need a little more finesse than the very simple boot script with have for the larger SD card slot.

I will look into it and give you a nudge back tomorrow. In the meantime try this:

Open a file in nano or gedit and type
Save it to some nice location, such as to your home directory. Let's call it "my_boot.script". Now run
The resulting boot.scr should be put on the first (fat or ext2 probably) partition of your SD card, in the root. It should try and boot from it now..

As for the debug board, there is a connector under the keyboard. Before you do anything though you should have a white flat cable with the debug board... do you?

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Matt Sealey

I have received the Smartbook with serial port friday 1/10 , in fact even my self is interested to know exactly if is useful and how connect it.

Some other queries:
In general I fine tune my gnu/linux on my notebook/desktop born with propritary OS.
But in general I need from the boot loader a rescue mode for have in any case a kernel functinal even if I invalidate the other kernel.

How we can or we will can have a rescue kernel with Efika Mx Smartbook?

In particular I see that powerdown and standby doesn't work properly , even the battery calculation is wrong tell me 0 hours and 6 minutes, in general look like an acpi problem.

For the computer born to windows is a bug in the compilation of the acpi rules , for example starting from kernel 2.6.35 there is the option acpi-copy to emulate in gnu/linux the windows wrong way to understand the buggy code of the acpi, In any case I don't think this is the EfikaMx case.

Thanks again

Roberto

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http://deliriotecnologico.blogspot.com

The same question - have you have the white flat cable?
With the new U-Boot update Matt was talking about, it will be easy to test your new kernels. All you will need is a regular SD card with either your test kernel or resuce kernel on it.

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Michal Schulz

Matt, Michal

I've had a good look through all of packaging and could only find the serial adaptor and no white cable. Is it possible that it's beneath the keyboard? Looking at the smartbook it appears that you can pry the keyboard along the top row of keys.

Gábor

Hello, it appears that the last shipment of smartbooks came without this cable. This is our fault. As soon as we have the cables, we will ship them out to all concerned.

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Bill many thanks!

If I've not said it before, Genesi really know how to treat their customers!

With the U-Boot updates we'll be basically shipping

1) Hopefully a new merged kernel which boots both boards
2) A suite of boot scripts
3) Documentation :) And how to unhook the keyboard on the Smartbook
4) Preprepared SD cards for Maverick installation, a LiveSD environment, and to help U-Boot flashing
5) Package repository with kernel, flash-kernel scripts for Maverick, and some other updates

I'd wait until you have the cable to even bother lifting the keyboard. You'll only need to do it once: the keyboard can go back into place once the flat cable is installed, but you will have this little white cable hanging off.. it's not intrusive but it could get damaged ifyou are carrying it around.

The schedule is for the end of next week.

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Matt Sealey

keyboard keys:
if I press key F2(volume down) or F3 (volume up) appear down right volume is at <percentage>% , but really nothing happen with the volume.
Brithness keys: F8 ,F9 doen't happen nothing.

cpu frequency scaling I see only two frequency 160Mhz and 800Mhz is a hardware or software choise or is possible to scale more than 2 frequency?
In my case for the 65% of time is at 800Mhz.

Mouse functionality:
Sometime after booting and insert the password , the mouse move the cursor very slow and itÅ› near to impossible to drag and drop, when you press one mouse you are not able to move the cursor...

Xorg coludn't open module imx
in the /var/log/Xorg.0.log i can see this messagge
end after load fbdev and after that DRI and DRI2 are not loaded, that mean that don't load hardware acceleration.

So could be is missing imx kernel module and or imx Xorg module.

In relation to the GPU wich is the AMD 2D/3D inside efika?
Some specs?

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http://deliriotecnologico.blogspot.com

The volume should work, are you on Maverick,or something older?
This can be tricky when you aren't used to this touchpad, however, something kind of cool that you can do is find the file you want, then double tap the pad, and the second time, keep pressing the pad, and then drag it to move. It definitely takes some getting used to.
The imx module that Xorg is talking about is just the Xorg driver from Freescale. The 3D chip on the machine does not do DRI or DRI2 (afaik, I will be corrected if I am wrong though.)

You need some different items to be properly packaged in order for it to work correct, though they can be found in the Freescale BSP until we have them. You need the firmware-imx (vpu firmware), imx-lib (which requires kernel headers), libz160-bin, amd-gpu-x11-bin-mx51, and finally the xserver-xorg-video-imx. These all need to be either compiled, or put into the proper place in the file system. At the present time though, the gpu driver causes a kernel panic. We are working on getting this resolved as we are using the same hardware as you are and run into the same issues.

Maverick

ok, Thanks
Ok, That's fine!
Thanks

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http://deliriotecnologico.blogspot.com

Just to reiterate what Steve said:
We know about this. I think the brightness keys are in a different input bus for evdev and Xorg doesn't handle it by default on the standard US keymap driver.
It could scale to 400MHz but there is very little point :)
Not seen that one here. For drag and drop you need to use the "trackpad method" which is this:

* lightly tap the trackpad where you want to click and drag
* release and tap again very quickly and drag immediately

Basically taptapDRAAAAAAG is how I like to think about it. The mouse buttons (physical microswitches) are a convenience more than anything.
Normal. Xorg will try and load it but doesn't because it doesn't exist. We will ship the accelerated driver once it is stable and it will magically work without any config file changes in this way.
No DRI is needed.
Z430 (OpenGL) and Z160 (OpenVG) - do you want fillrates or documentation? I can probably give you a heads up on performance details but definitely not on programming documentation.

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Matt Sealey

That's very nice!!! you think take more than one month to realize?
I think is just enough fillrates, if can give me some documentation more is welcome.

Thanks again for your perfect assistance!

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http://deliriotecnologico.blogspot.com

is the xorg driver open source ?

is there any part of the efika that would need proprietary blobs ?

The xorg driver is opensource, however the binary blob is needed for acceleration. (At least, that is my understanding of it, Matt will correct me if I'm wrong.) Also, while it is open source, it does require the binary blob (libz160) to compile