For those brave hearted, who would like to try the latest and greatest testing version of Ubuntu on their EFIKA, I put together an installer and a boot kernel for Gutsy. They are available at:

install: http://genesi.hu/ubuntu/gutsy_inst
boot: http://genesi.hu/ubuntu/gutsy_boot

Both kernels are based on Ubuntu sources and Nixnut patches. Here is the list of changes:

gutsy_inst:
- all EFIKA related features are compiled in
- SCSI & SCSI HDD support, USB HID devices support compiled n (these two cause some ugly, but harmless kernel messages, as these are normally in modules)
- /proc/config.gz
- SIS and nVidia framebuffer

gutsy_boot (in addition to gutsy_inst):
- ext2/ext3/reiserfs support compiled in, so it can boot without initrd
- network block device (LTSP)

Some remarks:

- I got some ugly warning messages about any SuSE formatted partition :-)

- installing any of the desktops from the 'tasksel' menu does not work. Instead of that use 'apt-get install XXX-desktop' on the installed system.

- installing two of the desktops results in broken config, X crashes after login

Finally: it's not intended to replace your current desktop, but to have a preview, what will become (ed/k/X/go/etc.)Ubuntu 7.10 in October. Still, your feedback is very welcome, and helps to improve Ubuntu on EFIKA.

Please report any of your EFIKA / kernel related problems here in this forum, and the rest (applications, localization, etc.) to http://launchpad.net/

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

that's great Peter, thanks a lot for your hard work and for sharing it with us !
I'll give a try to it tonight !

cheers

thanks again Peter, it works so fine here.
I'm posting from Ubuntu with XFCE (xubuntu) on the efika and everything is running just fine. Sound works too ! ;-)

EDIT : just one question Peter if you can help me.
I apt-getted xunbuntu-desktop but i can't get GDM to start after booting. It says GDM is not my default login manager. What conf file should i edit to set it as default ? I can see it trying to read something from /etc/rc.locale but it get stuck on it, i have to open a session manually and startx.

I have tried this on my EFIKA and all goes well until partitioning.

When I partition the hardd rive, it formats the partitions (swap and /), butwhen trying to mount /dev/sda (/) it fails. Logs from the EFIKA point to a 'no such device' error. This is illogical as the device is present in /dev .

I dropped to a terminal and tried to mount /dev/sda1 by hand using:

mount /dev/sda1 /target -t ext3

I get the same 'no such device' error.

I am using a IDE hard drive on the internal IDE on the board. The drive is proven as working in Debian Etch, and has no known faults.

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--

MacMiga
http://www.lincsamiga.org.uk

I get the same thing. It only lets you choose XFS to format the partitions, and refuses to mount any filesystem already made.

This is what testing is for, though.

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Matt Sealey

weird, i had no problems with manual partitioning at all (ext3). I deleted all previous partitions on my HD though.

A new installer was released the day before yesterday in the evening, and I suppose, the rest of the distribution was updated as well. As netinst downloads most of the installer from the net, this might cause some inconsistencies.

Right now my Pegasos is struggling with updating Gentoo (emerge --sync && emerge -uDNvp world). In the evening or tomorrow I'll try to catch up with the installer.

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

I thought that was the issue with mine so I wiped all my partitions and tried again to no avail. I'll try removing them, rebooting, then partitioning.

UPDATE: I can't remove the partitions then reboot, because it won't let me proceed without a root partition, thus it won't write the table to the disk :(.

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MacMiga
http://www.lincsamiga.org.uk

Ugly hack: if you really want to wipe everything from the HDD, then switch to Alt+F2, hit Enter to get a command prompt and enter: Of course, this means, that you need to have dd available. I don't know, it it's the case with Ubuntu...

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

An updated version of the installer is just being tested. It seems to work fine, so I'll upload it as soon as a successful installation is ready (later this evening).

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

OK, tested, works, uploaded :)

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Please send us an email if you are interested in working with czp and other folks from bplan and Genesi in a special Open Client Ubuntu/KDE Developer Program. It will start with the current Open Client and evolve into the EFIKA2/OCP2. All participants will receive a special version of the current Open Client Plus.

http://www.genesippc.com/openclient.php

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Wow: ubuntu developers worked hard during the weekend, and hunted down a number of bugs. Even if not perfect, the Ubuntu desktop became a lot more stable in the past few days. If you installed Gutsy last week, it is worth to upgrade. At the command line, just enter:

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Regarding SuSE I found this over the weekend;

http://home.kde.org/~binner/kde-four-live/

And now I am wondering, what really do we need to get KIWI working?

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Matt Sealey

KIWI uses syslinux & grub1, which are both hard coded in the spec files and sources. As a first step, these must be removed or rather just made conditional, then as a next step, add a few PowerPC specific things, like mkzimage. So basically the booting part must be changed, but that completely. As far as I can remember, it's written in Perl.

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/