Towards Microcore on Allwinner A10

[roberts]

No, I did not see that you posted another cut. I will post another update with the missing zram.

[suzuke]

No, actually I myself converted the provided fonts on a x86.
Please, describe your problem more accurately: "no luck" means no terminal at all or the old font persisting? What happens when you apply your font?
Did you check the font file's permissions?

Sorry for my bad depiction.
The situation is the backlight turns on, but it seems not to open the terminal.
I think the kernel is loaded correctly, but the bterm doesn't.
Does the font file's permission really have any effect on it?
I had used your font file with different permissions for simple quickly tests, and it seems not to have any effect.

[caminati]

Sorry for my bad depiction.
The situation is the backlight turns on, but it seems not to open the terminal.
I think the kernel is loaded correctly, but the bterm doesn't.
Does the font file's permission really have any effect on it?
I had used your font file with different permissions for simple quickly tests, and it seems not to have any effect.

Permissions was just a blind guess.
Maybe bterm doesn't like your particular fonts.
You could try it on another machine, like an X11-running ARM or X86, and see what happens.
I'm afraid nothing else's coming to my mind for the moment.

[Rich]

Hi suzuke
I would think you need read permissions set correctly in order to load the font.

[caminati]

Actually I made an 8MB partition to test with. And I used 8MB to dd the download img file.root@dev:/home/tc# df -h /mnt/sdc1/
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc1                 8.0M      5.8M      2.1M  73% /mnt/sdc1

It seems your dd worked fine.
However, I was just saying that, theoretically, it's possible, though unlikely, that dd-ing just 8Mb you lose some data, because one can't reasonably know where fat algorithm actually stores the files.
For example, if for whatever reason your mmc partition becomes fragmented, some piece of some file could end in that final 1Mb of the partition that you left out.
That's why I suggested dd-ing x+1 Mbytes, where x is the size of the whole partition, rather than only the used portion of it.
So in this case, I think the best thing is to dd 9Mbytes, or 9Mbytes + 1 sector, even better
Should I have misunderstood what you said, please ignore my whole rant.

[caminati]

No, I did not see that you posted another cut. I will post another update with the missing zram.

Gosh, I thought you posted in this thread about it booting fine (I'm referring to A10MicroCoreBeta0.1.tar.bz2).
Maybe I just lost count of the various version, it's been an hectic (and fruitful!) timeline.

[roberts]

I thought that is what I used. Yes, hectic. I am spread thin and trying to keep track of a of a bunch of sdcards.
Looking on the positive side, much progress with more to come.

[suzuke]

Permissions was just a blind guess.
Maybe bterm doesn't like your particular fonts.
You could try it on another machine, like an X11-running ARM or X86, and see what happens.
I'm afraid nothing else's coming to my mind for the moment.

I tried to use your fonts on my X86_64 machine with bterm and it got stuck.
(sudo bterm -f ocra-12.bogl )
The permissions of  ocra-12.bogl is :
-r--r--r--  1 root root  12384  8月 27 09:06 ocra-12.bogl
And I used my own fonts it works correctly.
-r--r--r--  1 root root 285908  8月 27 21:55 FreeMono.bogl
I also change the permissions of my font to:
----------  1 root root 285908  8月 27 21:55 FreeMono.bogl
It also works.
Due to this test, I think the permissions doesn't have any effect.

[caminati]

Permissions was just a blind guess.
Maybe bterm doesn't like your particular fonts.
You could try it on another machine, like an X11-running ARM or X86, and see what happens.
I'm afraid nothing else's coming to my mind for the moment.

I tried to use your fonts on my X86_64 machine with bterm and it got stuck.
(sudo bterm -f ocra-12.bogl )
The permissions of  ocra-12.bogl is :
-r--r--r--  1 root root  12384  8月 27 09:06 ocra-12.bogl
And I used my own fonts it works correctly.
-r--r--r--  1 root root 285908  8月 27 21:55 FreeMono.bogl
I also change the permissions of my font to:
----------  1 root root 285908  8月 27 21:55 FreeMono.bogl
It also works.
Due to this test, I think the permissions doesn't have any effect.

Uhm, I don't know.
I think I used latest version of bterm (it's from some year ago, so no ambiguity) available on packages.debian.org, and I think you have the same.
Another test you can do is booting with standard ocra (Robert's latest image, for example), then copy your bogl file to /usr/share/fonts, and the launch another instance of bterm, like bterm -f /usr/share/fonts FreeMono.bogl, without symlinking.
So you could see what would happen.

[roberts]

Another cut, for testing purposes only, now posted see:  http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/4.x/arm/armv7

[caminati]

Another cut, for testing purposes only, now posted see:  http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/4.x/arm/armv7

Just booted fine for me.
It looks quite complete, now!
I finally removed the two debugs added by me to tc-config:

Code: [Select]

SHOWAPPS=1and

Code: [Select]

# while [ ! -e /dev/rtc0 ]; do usleep 50000; doneAnd it still worked: this should be the original tc-config file working.
The (hopefully) only remaining problem is the error given by mkswap /dev/zram0, which was also in my release.
I found it can be solved by a preliminar

Code: [Select]

echo 33554432 > /sys/block/zram0/disksize.

Now I wonder why it's not needed in x86 Core?! Maybe there was a default size of /dev/zram0 in 3.0.21 which is no longer in 3.0.39?
Anyway, some reasonable value for /sys/block/zram0/disksize should be probably devised to be set by tc-config script.
Here http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201107/page12.html 25% of free memory is suggested.

[curaga]

There was a bug in zram in 3.0 at least, we have a patch for it. It's also fixed in upstream, but I'm not sure which versions have the fix.

(The docs state that lacking the disksize echo, it defaults to 25% of RAM. This didn't work in 3.0)

[caminati]

Robert, I think your busybox has dns-related issues.
I have /etc/resolv.conf, and no dhcp server running.
I can't ping neither wget nor traceroute any server name, only IPs.
On the other hand, using another busybox, I can.
Could be a bug in more recent busybox, or the build configuration or who knows what.
Anyone can reproduce this?

[roberts]

What version of busybox and would need its config file.

[caminati]

What version of busybox and would need its config file.

The problematic busybox is the one included in
http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/4.x/arm/armv7/a10Core-20120827.img.gz

I wonder if you used http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/4.x/x86/release/src/busybox-1.19.2-config to build it.

The working one is this:
http://www.busybox.net/downloads/binaries/1.17.2/busybox-armv6l
Not sure about whether I could get the corresponding config file.