Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

I've booted the C8 and I8 (I have both) using the 'offline' image modified for my used widgets on a usb flash stick

Haven't tried the SD Card

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

I did manage to get the OE version working, but I could never get the wifi up and going.  The last time I tried, however, I could not get a working image.  I'm wondering if there is a problem with some of the sources.

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

I did get debian to mostly run on an external flash drive using the information found in these links

http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=6411
http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=7967

I gave up after a little bit because the performance was terrible and the WM (matchbox) was terrible.
I also wanted to try an arm port of gentoo, but I didn't get far with that, either.
I had started with OE, and came back to it a couple of times, but to no avail.  I had managed to get a few bad images that froze at the splash screen, but upon recompile to check, it broke.  Not even the starter image compiled.
Is there anything out there that works AND is usable?

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

Yep, the original ROM image.

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

Joan Jett wrote:

{gong, gong, buzz, buzz}
Thank you for playing!
No luck with the Marvell images.
In the interim since the thread has been quiet, has anyone made any progress on getting *something* working on a C8/I8? Even my original card has become corrupted. I set it aside and used blank uSD cards to play, but it will no longer boot the device. I've tried the OEM I8 image available from Insignia as well.

So even the OEM image doesn't boot for you?  Maybe something is wrong w/ your hardware or power supply.

Linux Guy - Occasional Chumby Hacker

31 (edited by Joan Jett 2012-11-19 10:59:58)

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

As far as the OEM I8 image, I'm thinking that the bootable partition is not writing correctly. I've used dd to do this. Also tried with the windows image writer thing. Do I have to manually move something into the bootable partition like a zImage? I'm not in a position to check what's on the chip after writing the .img to it just now. Will check when I get home.

http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?pid=5721#p5721 talks about having to align partitions a certain way.

http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?pid=6253#p6253 talks about

Brian, #1 Joan Jett Fan

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

Well you all might find this interesting. Ironic that my I8 has been resurrected on the last day of the year. That first 9.4 mb partition never had it's boot flag set. Kinda thought laying down the image file woulda done that. First time I noticed it was today. Set it with fdisk and the thing booted immediately. ExtraCrispy lives again!

Brian, #1 Joan Jett Fan

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

Good way to start the new year!

Tar, feathers, congress. Some assembly required.

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

It's always those pesky little details.

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

More good news -- Today I got my C8 copied image to boot finally!  Only difference was using a Sandisk 2G (like the one originally supplied) micro card instead of a PQ1 2G.

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

Hello kcsaychum,
would your share your image, because I don't get my to boot properly?
Kuttel

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

kcsaychum wrote:

More good news -- Today I got my C8 copied image to boot finally!  Only difference was using a Sandisk 2G (like the one originally supplied) micro card instead of a PQ1 2G.

Hum. I wonder if all this trouble was due to bad uSD cards. Bunnie did a big write-up on his blog about this. I mean, when I bought a few uSD cards for this experiment, I bought the $9 ones not the $29 ones. Could it be that simple?

Brian, #1 Joan Jett Fan

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

Very likely.  The quality varies a great deal, and there's a lot of counterfeit and quality-rejected-but-found-its-way-back stuff floating around.

bunnie also found some *intentionally* mislabeled stuff - for instance, a 1GB card might be labelled 2GB, counting on people not filling them up immediately.  When you hit the 1GB line, it just wraps the data around and overwrites.  The partitions, and sometimes the controllers, are hacked to give the illusion of the labeled size, so it's hard to detect without actually filling it up.  People think the card is just worn out and replace it, when in fact they were scammed.

At one point, we added random testing of new batches of SD cards and did exactly that.

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

It is amazing how bad the "value" cards can be. As cheap as brand name cards are these days I really don't see a need to buy a "value" card. Not only do most brand name cards give you better quality and maybe more space, but they can be much faster even at the same rated speed.

Tar, feathers, congress. Some assembly required.

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

Hm. I got Transcend 8g's. I'll have to have a look at the stenciling and the ID data. I just reread Bunnie's article. I'll just link it here in case anyone's interested. It's a good read!

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022

Brian, #1 Joan Jett Fan

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

It may also be worth noting that at least the iMX233 CPU (found on the Chumby One and Infocast 3.5) will fail to boot from certain uSD cards that take a longer-than-usual time to initialize. I've run into this issue with a few off-brand cards which would make the iMX233 spit out a debug code (don't remember which one) at poweron; putting the exact same image on another card worked flawlessly.

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

dusk wrote:

It may also be worth noting that at least the iMX233 CPU (found on the Chumby One and Infocast 3.5) will fail to boot from certain uSD cards that take a longer-than-usual time to initialize. I've run into this issue with a few off-brand cards which would make the iMX233 spit out a debug code (don't remember which one) at poweron; putting the exact same image on another card worked flawlessly.

Great find!  I wonder if this is what's making my attempts to move some of my Chumbies to larger cards fail.  I'll have to scrounge up some better SD cards to test with.  My 32GB card in my phone just crapped itself, so my 8GB spare that could've been appropriated for this purpose is unfortunately no longer available hmm

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

I have never succeeded with sd cards more than 2 gigs on the C8.  It would boot, but i would get data read errors that seemed to indicate that the machine was trying to read data it couldn't find.  I did not have that problem on a 2 gig card.

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

pete_c was really the only one I remember who had some success. Something about deleting the 4th partition before putting it in the infocast. Oh well.

Brian, #1 Joan Jett Fan

45 (edited by quispie12@yahoo.com 2013-09-30 15:38:10)

Re: OpenEmbedded/chumby-starter-image

Okay, so I'm not feeling so bad now.  I thought I was the only one who couldn't get OE working on my Insignia 8.

I've tried to build OE for my Insignia using both of these URL howtos with varying results:

http://wiki.chumby.com/index.php?title= … ded_(Beta)    (created silvermoon image but it doesn't quite boot up.  it eventually freezes after the startup screen due to interrupt errors as I recall)

http://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title … enEmbedded      (failed 12 hours into the build due to GIT dumb-https errors)


BTW - I do have OE working on my Chumby One with full touchscreen support and I also was able to get a hybrid of OE/Debian Squeeze working by using the OE boot with a Debian rootfs that replaces the OE rootfs (no chroot).  Unfortunately I haven't found a solution for the touchscreen in Debian yet.    My post is over in Chumby - the device.

Perhaps it's worth a try to take my 1st silvermoon build that locks up and try to overlay the Debian rootfs with that because I don't actually know exactly where it fails in the boot process..  I've heard from a chumby developer that the Silvermoon Opus version should have a working touchscreen patch, so I was hoping to install that if I could ever get that far. 

The silvermoon opus kernel is in the usual locale  (see http://files.chumby.com/source/)

Please don't be afraid to contact me if you have updates