I'm currently trying to wrap my head around uboot (in order to get gentoo running off an SD card).


When I did research on the smartbook I saw announcements that the MX platform would be running your Aura firmware. Do you still plan to use Aura on the Efika MX platform? if so when will it be ready?

it would be very nice to be able to just boot from an emulated console on the framebuffer like on a sun workstation instead of dealing with boot.scr and friends.

I know about the serial port but I don't have the special JTAG/Serial board to access that.

I don't expect Aura very soon (I'm sure the Linux driver work takes priority) but I do hope that uboot wont be around forever.

Hi William, Aura will be featured first on the imx53 products that will be released later this year. The first hardware is in development now.

R&B :)

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Any chance we might get an update to load it on the MX51 machines at some point?

Maybe. Some things can be extracted and others not -- at least with the current products. We will post more information as the development continues.

R&B :)

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Hi,

As a Gentoo developer myself, I have some preliminary documentation for installing Gentoo on an SD card, written with armin76's support. It's located at http://dev.gentoo.org/~armin76/arm/efik ... nstall.xml Please let me know if it leaves anything out

_________________
Steev Klimaszewski, Genesi USA Inc.
Senior Software Engineer

I think I was using the instructions here instead http://dev.gentoo.org/~darkside/arm/efi ... nstall.xml

which didnt work so well with the smartbook. it seems it wasn't loading the usb driver so the kb didnt work.

I did get his overlay working by modifying the root fs and putting in the same kernel as the one that ships currently with the smartbook and forcing the usb driver to load at boot time.

I will try your instructions instead and let you know how it goes.

I'm not exactly a gentoo developer I just wanted to see if I could get it installed to see how well it ran. are there any images that have full X installed on them? I know gentoo is a source based distro but building everything is likely to take a very long time. I'm particularly interested in seeing how well the efika runs with everything compiled for arm with hardware floating point enabled.

Yeah, Jeremy's instructions are for the Smarttop, not the Smartbook. As you can see in my documentation it's still a bit rough around the edges. I don't do images myself because the same steps have to be taken regardless. To me, Gentoo is all about personalization. You might not like what I want, and vice versa. I know the instructions should work, but I may have glossed over some things or forgotten a thing here or there because I'm just so used to installing Gentoo.

_________________
Steev Klimaszewski, Genesi USA Inc.
Senior Software Engineer

I haven't bothered with hardfp yet on the smartbook, the main reason being that you can't do 3D with it. Unfortunately, there is a binary library in the OpenGLES sources, so I can't even build the drivers for hardfp :( We're working on it though. We had a meeting with Freescale on Friday, and hardfp/armhf(debian) was brought up.

I don't do images personally, because, well, what I want installed on my system is likely not what you want installed on yours. The instructions provided at the link above are basically how you install pretty much any Gentoo system.

_________________
Steev Klimaszewski, Genesi USA Inc.
Senior Software Engineer