FatdogArm Alpha4 - 1 November 2013 [CLOSED]

[pedro]

Apparently I still need a little help. I am not sure of two things.
1.) Which mk802 I have. Mine has a barcode on the back that says "MK802A-1" Which kernel should I download for that?
2.) I following the installation instructions to the letter, using the two partition option. /dev/sdb1 is FAT32 500MB /dev/sdb2 is EXT4 7.12GB
no errors were generated. I used the mele kernel rather than the mk802ii.
When I put the micro SD into the MK802A-1 and powered up it booted straight to Android (which performs miserably on this device). Should I try the kernel for the MK802ii and if, so do I need to redo the uboot step or just swap the files out? Sorry it took me so long to get back to this project, I don't have consistent access to the device as my wife is generally using it to stream music or video when I have time to work on this.

There seem to be at least three different mk802 models:

mk802
mk802-1gb
mk802_A10s

Can you tell us if your model has 512mb or 1gb memory?
Can you take a look inside and check if your mk802 has a A10 or a A10s cpu?
With this i can build you specific script.bin and uboot for your device

Have you tryed booting alpha 3 iso?

Here is the link to what I bought on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008H3 ... UTF8&psc=1
It does have a label on the back of the device that says "MK802A-1" I don't think I can get it open without breaking it. I definitely has the 1GB of RAM listed in the specs at Amazon.
Sorry it took so long for me to get back to this.

I made a image for mk802_1gb. it comes with mele kernel and mk802_1gb u-boot/script.bin. It's a 1gb image. Just write the image to a sd card and try to see if it works.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cd0r4vm2gsnf3 ... k8021g.zip

[01micko]

Exynos rocks!

If you have a spare $100 (and an HDMI telly) get an odroid-u3. I mean it.

This is damn fast... and I mean it makes my athlon 2100+ look like the POS it is.

It was a bit of a challenge to get working because there was some problem with the uboot-u2.bin so I had to overwrite that with a blob from this site.

EDIT: Only a matter of hours after making this post, jamesbond fixed the uboot image and provided new instructions in the README for dd command and I can confirm it works!

Sound,video and all work BUT I had to force module loading (in rc.local) and it didn't work from uEnv.txt, maybe PEBKAC error. I have this:

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loadmodules=fuse,ipt_MASQUERADE,iptable_nat,nf_conntrack_ipv4,nf_defrag_ipv4,nf_nat_ipv4,nf_nat,nf_conntrack,ip_tables,x_tables,bridge,bnep,stp,llc,smsc95xx,mousedev

I translated that to a loop to load on startup then connect to the net manually once I bring up eth0.

I did have res problems on my crappy old aldi HDMI enabled panel TV ("vivid" 21") but managed to add this to uEnv.txt:

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video=video=HDMI-A-1:1280x720M@60

Still has some overscan (underscan? Well it's a little too big for the display, that is I can't see all of top, bottom, left, right for only a few pixels, quite usable though).

I tested sound, works through HDMI. Yay! One thing we could not get to work with raspberry pi. I tested an html5 (webm encoded) video and picture is fine, no sound. I think its either a bug or a config miss in seamonkey. For the record, Slacko (32) Firefox-17.11 plays sound with said video, compiled by PV, and he is a stickler for keeping things "free", good on 'im too. Its a shame same can't be said about Samsung, Broadcom and all the other ARM vendors.

Did I mention this is fast?

[jamesbond]

pedro, thanks for helping.

it didn't work from uEnv.txt

You need to put the "loadmodules" parameter in "extras=", e.g:

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extras=loadmodules=blah blah blah[

... but, there is a limit on the length of the line; if the line gets too long it gets ignored by uboot. Exactly how long - I'm not in the mood of reading uboot source code yet, but I have on occasion exceeded this limit and wondered why it didn't have any effect

PS: smsc95xx is compiled as built-in, so you don't need to load it.

For the TV, I used "JustScan". I still get some lost pixels in console, but in Xorg, everything looks intact.

For HTML5 sound - it can be made to work. Let me know how it goes.

Did I mention this is fast?

Yes, you did, this just an example: seamonkey took 15-18 hours to compile on the original Mele; it took a wee over 2 hours on this thing. It is *unbelievably fast* for a chip the size of your thumbnail and runs without fan.

[01micko]

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extras=loadmodules=blah blah blah[

... but, there is a limit on the length of the line; if the line gets too long it gets ignored by uboot. Exactly how long - I'm not in the mood of reading uboot source code yet, but I have on occasion exceeded this limit and wondered why it didn't have any effect

Hmmm.. maybe I should have figured that (re extra=)

PS: smsc95xx is compiled as built-in, so you don't need to load it.

Ok .. I was just going off a list I made in ubuntu.. may have missed some. However it does seem like module loading is somewhat hampered.

For the TV, I used "JustScan". I still get some lost pixels in console, but in Xorg, everything looks intact.

Yeah.. works with Sammy.. Aldi(='vivid' model)? Nah!

For HTML5 sound - it can be made to work. Let me know how it goes.

Yes..! Works. Apologies for presumptuous crap in previous post.

Did I mention this is fast?

Yes, you did, this just an example: seamonkey took 15-18 hours to compile on the original Mele; it took a wee over 2 hours on this thing. It is *unbelievably fast* for a chip the size of your thumbnail and runs without fan.

It sure is impressive!

HTML5 is very impressive, as long as you don't go fullscreen. (YouTube etc). This seems to be a limitation of the video driver. Not much can be done there.

I plugged my ucv webcam and after installing mplayer seems to work ok, a bit of latency. Dunno how to work it Xine. Which brings me to a bug. Xine works perfectly playing many formats, but as soon as you go fullscreen it crashes.

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root:~/smb/Video/Cloud_Babies# xine "Cloudbabies Sun's Very Own Sunset.mp4"
This is xine (X11 gui) - a free video player v0.99.7.
(c) 2000-2010 The xine Team.  ##### PRESSED "F"
X Error of failed request:  BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter)
  Major opcode of failed request:  130 (MIT-SHM)
  Minor opcode of failed request:  3 (X_ShmPutImage)
  Resource id in failed request:  0x1a002ff
  Serial number of failed request:  177
  Current serial number in output stream:  178
root:~/smb/Video/Cloud_Babies# 
root:~/smb/Video/Cloud_Babies# xine -fs "Cloudbabies Sun's Very Own Sunset.mp4"
This is xine (X11 gui) - a free video player v0.99.7.
(c) 2000-2010 The xine Team.
X Error of failed request:  BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter)
  Major opcode of failed request:  130 (MIT-SHM)
  Minor opcode of failed request:  3 (X_ShmPutImage)
  Resource id in failed request:  0x1a002ff
  Serial number of failed request:  11
  Current serial number in output stream:  12

Note the "PRESSED "F"" comment.. mine.

Mplayer is just no good. Too slow. Doesn't crash (even full screen) but can't keep up. Explains my latent webcam result.

Now.. ffplay is perfect! (Yes, I am playing over network.. shouldn't matter). once upon a time I worked out how to play a DVD in ffplay.. but there is so much variation in the proprietary crap they put on DVDs that that avenue is definitely not worth pursuing.

This command works perfectly for webcam:

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root:~# ffplay -f video4linux2  -s 640x480 -i /dev/video10
ffplay version 1.2.1 Copyright (c) 2003-2013 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Aug 13 2013 00:13:55 with gcc 4.6.2 (GCC)
  configuration: --prefix=/usr --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-nonfree --disable-static --enable-shared --enable-x11grab --enable-libfaac --enable-libfreetype --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libspeex --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvpx --enable-libxvid --enable-openssl --disable-debug --enable-libfdk-aac --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libopus --enable-librtmp --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libtwolame --enable-libvo-aacenc --enable-libvo-amrwbenc --enable-libx264
  libavutil      52. 18.100 / 52. 18.100
  libavcodec     54. 92.100 / 54. 92.100
  libavformat    54. 63.104 / 54. 63.104
  libavdevice    54.  3.103 / 54.  3.103
  libavfilter     3. 42.103 /  3. 42.103
  libswscale      2.  2.100 /  2.  2.100
  libswresample   0. 17.102 /  0. 17.102
  libpostproc    52.  2.100 / 52.  2.100
Option -s is deprecated, use -video_size.
[video4linux2,v4l2 @ 0x9e4f0] Estimating duration from bitrate, this may be inaccurate
Input #0, video4linux2,v4l2, from '/dev/video10':
  Duration: N/A, start: 934.200073, bitrate: 147456 kb/s
    Stream #0:0: Video: rawvideo (YUY2 / 0x32595559), yuyv422, 640x480, 147456 kb/s, 30 fps, 30 tbr, 1000k tbn, 1000k tbc
 957.78 A-V:  0.000 fd=   0 aq=    0KB vq=    0KB sq=    0B f=0/0    
root:~# q

[Jota]

Hehehe, what kind of news are you expecting? I'm currently building FatdogArm beta with gcc 4.8.1 and glibc-2.18 - if that's what you want to hear. It will take a while though as it is a full rebuilt. (No, I don't just change glibc). Meanwhile, alpha4 is very usable. In fact I'm building the beta using alpha4

Hi!!
Does your kernel for the Allwinner A10 support f2fs ??
Thank you!
J.

WELL...
I THOUGHT THIS WAS A FAIRLY SIMPLE AND EASY QUESTION...
BUT IF NOT EVEN 007 IS ABLE TO ANSWER IT, I JUST HAVE TO APOLOGIZE FOR ASKING....
PROBABLY I AM TOO DUMB!
THANK YOU ALL !!

[Ted Dog]

jota no reply from JB007 ? That can be a good sign. He usually only post where there is compiling issues I suspect since that is a filesystem most needed in ARM systems and would not have any issue compiling.
I fully expect that that file system would be default image by final, my SDcards are already showing the slowdown problems caused by over use of key areas and the remapping behind.

[01micko]

Hi!!
Does your kernel for the Allwinner A10 support f2fs ??
Thank you!
J.

On ODROID kernel...

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root:~# gunzip -c /proc/config.gz|grep -iE f2fs
# CONFIG_F2FS_FS is not set

So that would be no. I don't know about other kernels.

[Ted Dog]

if you guys get a chance pop over to geexbox and see if you can follow how they got the hardware blob from android to decode video In mele hardware, sound like they are supporting like hardware for the ARM as we are...
also they have a hybrid boot with EFI for 64bit. I can't hunt around there anymore Its too easy to hit a download link. And GeexBox is no longer tiny like they once where... now down to vapors on data plan.. If I suddenly disappear from the forum u know why !

[starhawk]

Just curious, what packages work with this? If I can afford it, I might get an MK802-II off eBay and start playing with this.

Also, is a 2gig microSD card big enough to do anything useful? That's all I have right now may be able to get an 8gig from WalMart but no promises... it depends on what price it is when I have a little money again.

[Jota]

@ 01micko, Ted Dog

Thank you!

I myself tried to compile the A10 3.10-experimental kernel from linux-sunxi.org, but did not manage to make it work.

What I find very strange is the owner of this topic - 007, did not bother to answer my question... maybe we could have exchanged some ideas and progress a little further.

But now I will rest my Cubie and do other stuff, at least until I have new ideas to try to make f2fs work.
J.

[01micko]

Here is a very simple wall paper setter with preview in ~54 lines. Should be able to handle spaces also.

Just add some wallpapers to /usr/share/backgrounds.

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gunzip wallset-0.1-noarch-1_FDA.tbz.gz

then install with

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installpkg wallset-0.1-noarch-1_FDA.tbz

[01micko]

Very happy that tunneling X over ssh logged in as 'mick' (oh yes multiuser is working quite well) is working perfectly. I'm on my slacko64 box typing this on seamonkey running on the odroid. Very fast actually (probably because there is next to zero network latency). Zero lag in typing this message, probably attributed to the speed of both systems as well as the close proximity (network wise).



(ha.. while typing this had to scp over the screen cap )

EDIT:

Very happy that tunneling X over ssh .. is working perfectly.

The reverse is also true with the brand new slacko64-5.8.8 which includes dropbear server/client.

[jamesbond]

Which brings me to a bug. Xine works perfectly playing many formats, but as soon as you go fullscreen it crashes.

That's xine for you. Try to change the video output modules; try XVideo, SDL and XShm. XShm usually always works. I'll try to build vlc next time.

What I find very strange is the owner of this topic - 007, did not bother to answer my question...

Firstly, I was away on a mission and secondly, what you asked is highly classified. I could tell you but then I would have to kill you. I would rather not do that
But you can rejoice now, the powers that be have decided to de-classify them after somebody leaked that vital information.

Here is the answer you seek:

No, none of the FatdogArm kernels support f2fs at the time being. For odroid, it's rather easy enable f2fs - flick the configuration item and recompile the kernel. For Cubie/Mele, it is a bit difficult because f2fs support isn't there; I will have to backport the patches for 3.4 kernel that 01micko gave me a while ago. That being said, please read the last comment on this page: https://github.com/nowcomputing/f2fs-backports/issues/1.

Just curious, what packages work with this? If I can afford it, I might get an MK802-II off eBay and start playing with this.

What usage scenario do you have in mind? Some of us can probably help to compile the packages you need.

Also, is a 2gig microSD card big enough to do anything useful? That's all I have right now

It depends on what you plan to use it for. I used 1GB card and 40GB external harddisk to build FatdogArm Alpha from the scratch (that 40GB disk is 10+ years old).

[starhawk]

General desktop use was what I had in mind, just fooling around to see what performance is available from an MK802-original. (Performance is something I have to gauge for myself. What's slow for you is often fast for me )

Basically:

Chrome or Chromium (with full capabilities including flash and extension support -- I'm on Chromium31+Pepperflash right now, off these very forums)
LibreOffice (or a nearly identical substitute)
Some sort of professional vector art program (better than Inkscape, needs to support Corel *.cdr files)
Printing support for Canon and HP printers (including printing 11x17 paper for Canons; the HP is an all-in-one)
Scanning support for HP and Xerox scanners (the HP is that all-in-one, and the Xerox is oooooold but works nicely)
Wine would be super amazing but I'm not expecting it... although if it were there and performed reasonably well, it'd take care of the vector art program requirement
Music player
Picture viewer (I like Viewnior, a lot -- hint, hint)
Support for USB flash media (not bootable, just for files)
IceWM support would be nice (but I realize that it's not likely either). It's pretty (I'm an artist. Pretty matters.)

Mostly I'm a web-browsing and email dude. I do write stuff occasionally, and I do vector art occasionally. I listen to music a lot. I'd like to see if I can do everything I use an x86 system for, on ARM.

I'd get an ODROID but I don't have the money and I don't really have a way of saving up (that was my ulterior motive in asking you a while back what would become of the ODROID you have, once you're done with it -- I was hoping to get it for a song, but I realize now that it's not happening.)

[Ted Dog]

lol.
starhawk you made me laugb hard... That is not a trival request list... Would love to have half of those well supported by default in any puppylinux spin.

[can8v]

There seem to be at least three different mk802 models:

mk802
mk802-1gb
mk802_A10s

Can you tell us if your model has 512mb or 1gb memory?
Can you take a look inside and check if your mk802 has a A10 or a A10s cpu?
With this i can build you specific script.bin and uboot for your device

Have you tryed booting alpha 3 iso?

Here is the link to what I bought on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008H3 ... UTF8&psc=1
It does have a label on the back of the device that says "MK802A-1" I don't think I can get it open without breaking it. I definitely has the 1GB of RAM listed in the specs at Amazon.
Sorry it took so long for me to get back to this.

I made a image for mk802_1gb. it comes with mele kernel and mk802_1gb u-boot/script.bin. It's a 1gb image. Just write the image to a sd card and try to see if it works.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cd0r4vm2gsnf3 ... k8021g.zip

I never could get this to work, I finally gave up and sold it today. I am getting my wife the OODroid U3 Community Edition instead. Hopefully I will be able to get Fat Dog Arm working on it, as I am not planning on ordering the Android module for it and I would rather not have to put Ubuntu on it.
Thanks for your efforts in helping me try to get this working, but I think the A-1 version of the device, simply will not boot from the micro SD slot. No matter what I tried it went straight to Android.

[pedro]

Here is the link to what I bought on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008H3 ... UTF8&psc=1
It does have a label on the back of the device that says "MK802A-1" I don't think I can get it open without breaking it. I definitely has the 1GB of RAM listed in the specs at Amazon.
Sorry it took so long for me to get back to this.

I made a image for mk802_1gb. it comes with mele kernel and mk802_1gb u-boot/script.bin. It's a 1gb image. Just write the image to a sd card and try to see if it works.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cd0r4vm2gsnf3 ... k8021g.zip

I never could get this to work, I finally gave up and sold it today. I am getting my wife the OODroid U3 Community Edition instead. Hopefully I will be able to get Fat Dog Arm working on it, as I am not planning on ordering the Android module for it and I would rather not have to put Ubuntu on it.
Thanks for your efforts in helping me try to get this working, but I think the A-1 version of the device, simply will not boot from the micro SD slot. No matter what I tried it went straight to Android.

Sorry for not being able to help you more but on the other hand that was a good choice, i have one U2, and it works great with fatdog. It's a lot more powerful than allwinner A10. If you have any problem installing we will be here to help you

[can8v]

lol.
starhawk you made me laugb hard... That is not a trival request list... Would love to have half of those well supported by default in any puppylinux spin.

I think Starhawk's list is quite doable and I have had similar setups in a few of the puppies I have used over the years. Certainly I always at least try any puplet that uses something other than Seamonkey. I have never liked that setup. I don't like JWM or ROX either so I always like to try out puplets that have something else. For window managers I love XFCE, and LXDE. I can go for iceWM as well. I like Thunar, xfe, PCman and SpaceMan for file managers. Chromium and Chrome are the best browsers I have seen in Linux. When it comes to a browser I don't mind it being a little large as long as it is blazing fast, accurately renders pages, supports flash and java and has basic features like tabbed browsing. I don't need email, P2P or any other non-webbrowsing features built in.

All I really expect out of the box though is for my hardware to be supported, a good window manager and file manager, and a package manager with all the packages I need. Sheesh, that isn't to much to ask is it?

Then again I have been waiting for years for somebody to figure out how to get any version of puppy working on the ARM platform, so at this point I am quite happy to take whatever I can get.

That reminds me. Thank you JB007 and all who helped make this happen.

[jamesbond]

Chrome or Chromium

I'll skip this unless someone can point me to an existing binary that work. Reason? see below about libreoffice. Somebody talked about pre-built Chromium waterfall which didn't quite work in Fatdog64 due to missing dependencies, we'll see if it fares better in FatdogArm - if an ARM version already exists in binary form (it should, ChromeOS runs on ARM).

(with full capabilities including flash

Ah yes, Flash. The only one that comes with full Flash support now is XO-4; even XO-1.75 doesn't have it (licensing problems). The reason is simple - it is closed-source software; so we are the mercy of Adobe. If Adobe doesn't release the binaries for us - then we don't have it. I've read people using ChromeOS flash player (Pepperflash, yes that's the one - the ARM version) with limited success - but then you have to be running Chromium.

and extension support

This would be less of a problem if you can solve the first two above

LibreOffice (or a nearly identical substitute)

Right now I only have Abiword and Gnumeric. Gnumeric is good enough for most tasks; abiword, not very. Libreoffice doesn't have ready-made ARM binaries, but we should be able to build one (do you know that the source of chromium, a *web browser*, is a couple of times larger than the size of libreoffice source code, a *full fledged office suite*? That's the reason I *flatly refuse* to build chromium from source. Gzipped source of seamonkey is around 150MB. Gzipped source of chromium is in the GBs range. You may disagree with me but I hold the opinion that chrome/chromium goodness is way overhyped and overstated. )

Anyway, the reason I didn't attempt to build libreoffice before is because I didn't see the point - Mele wasn't power enough to build it (it already struggled to build seamonkey). I may try this on the odroid later when beta is stable.

Some sort of professional vector art program (better than Inkscape, needs to support Corel *.cdr files)

Such as?

Printing support for Canon and HP printers (including printing 11x17 paper for Canons; the HP is an all-in-one)
Scanning support for HP and Xerox scanners (the HP is that all-in-one, and the Xerox is oooooold but works nicely)

Hardware support depends on drivers provided by the vendor. Most postscript printers are okay; but some inkjets require proprietary blobs that only exist on certain architecture; if they don't supply you the blobs for ARM then you can only bite your fingers ... That being said, I don't have a lot of printers for testing (in fact I only have one - an old Epson TX100 - and that one works). You know the go-to man for any printer, scanner and dvd/blueray issues is rcrsn51; but he isn't involved in the ARM arena yet.

Wine would be super amazing but I'm not expecting it

Wine only works on x86/x86_64, unfortunately.

Music player

Xine and mplayer in alpha, VLC in beta.

Picture viewer (I like Viewnior, a lot -- hint, hint)

yes, viewnior is the default on both alpha and beta.

Support for USB flash media (not bootable, just for files)

Yes, working now.

IceWM support

IceWM package will be available in beta. But it's not configured, so I'm happy to accept contributions (must be properly multi-user configured).

uses something other than Seamonkey.

Seamonkey gives the best bang for the buck.

I don't like JWM or ROX

JWM and ROX are the lightest weight all-round window managers, file managers, and desktop. Both are acquired taste. I don't fancy JWM but I have to admit that it is excellent for what it is doing. ROX is the lightest-weight desktop+filemanager, unfortunately it is no longer maintained so eventually it will go away - but while it works, it will stay.

I love XFCE, and LXDE

XFCE is nice, but it is not lightweight. We already have some of LXDE (ie openbox and lxpanel), it is a matter of bringing other LXDE programs into it.

I like Thunar, xfe, PCman and SpaceMan

Spaceman is more or less a replacement for PCMan. I considered to build SpaceFM before but haven't gotten around to do it. xfe is ok - I'll keep it in my todo list (xfe requires fltk). I can't remember where Thunar came from - is it from XFCE?

java

Yes, I want to have java too - I looked at it recently, on ARM it is not as easy in x86 because you *have* build it instead of using Oracle binaries; and building it is a bit of chicken and egg; because to build java you need ... java (seriously: to build java you need "Ant" build tool; and to run "Ant" you need java ... that is among many other similar things) I'll see if I can get Debian's OpenJDK to run on FatdogArm instead.

a package manager

FatdogArm uses slapt-get and gslapt; which is quite nice (I think) and faster than Fatdog64's own package manager.

with all the packages I need.

FatdogArm is compatible for Slackbuilds (for building from source). I will include sbopkg (slackbuild package manager) in beta. I don't have the tool yet, but in theory it should be possible to use Debian armhf packages on FatdogArm beta as well as they have the same hardware platform requirement (you can't do that for alpha because the hardware requirement *was* different).

All I really expect out of the box though is for my hardware to be supported

To put things into perspective: I'm just one person with limited resources; so support can only go so far. *Especially* hardware support, and *especially* in the ARM world where every device is different ... I can't test with hardware I don't own. People like Jemimah and rcrsn51 went as far as *buying* devices so that they can test them; I don't have that kind of resources to do the same; I've got kids to feed

I am quite happy to take whatever I can get.

And you can make it better by contributing packages (when you get up and running) or other things.

Thank you JB007 and all who helped make this happen.

No worries, and again I would thank the anonymous benefactor who kindly gave me the boards and to mavrothal who sponsored me to get the XOs, and kirk who started Fatdog project in the first place.

cheers!

[Mercedes350se]

i have one U2, and it works great with fatdog. It's a lot more powerful than allwinner A10. If you have any problem installing we will be here to help you

I assume that fatdog will also work on the odroid u3?