[Sugar-devel] porting Sugar on a Marvell tablet (avlite)

[Nagarjuna G]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 8:21 AM, creatures <grandresearcht at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sascha Silbe <sascha-ml-reply-to-2011-1 <at> silbe.org> writes:
>
>>
>> Excerpts from Nagarjuna G's message of Mon Jan 03 08:50:07 +0100 2011:
>> > This is just to let you know that that we have successfully built the
>> > latest sugar-jhbuild on Debian GNU/Linux unstable for a tablet by
>> > Marvell's  PXA168 Avengers lite Development Platform.  This has 256MB
>> > ram and a 4GB flash.
>>
>> I would have expected it to work (IIRC all of the ARM-specific bugs
>> I reported at Debian have been fixed by now, some of them recently),
>> but I'm nevertheless delighted to hear about your positive experience.
>>
>> > Most of the things are working as expected, though there is lot of
>> > work left.  I will make a wikipage with screenshots soon.
>>
>> > Once I find a virtual keyboard solution the system is ready.
>>
>> For a production system running on only 4GB flash I highly recommend
>> using native Debian packages instead of sugar-jhbuild, especially for
>> storage space reasons. Jonas' repository (see Debian wiki [1]) contains
>> some updates and additional packages that didn't make it in time for the
>> freeze.
>>
>> > Are there others on the list working on similar systems?
>>
>> I'm running Sugar (both sugar-jhbuild and native Debian packages) on an
>> OpenRD-Base (via VNC+ssh, no physical screen; 0.5TB low-power HDD) for
>> testing purposes.
>> OLPC is running Sugar on XO-1.75 prototypes which are based on a Marvell
>> ARM SoC, though they're sticking to Fedora for consistency with previous
>> OLPC builds.
>>
>> I've been running Sugar 0.82 (from Debian packages) on my PXA270 based
>> smartphone for fun, but with only 64MB of RAM it was of no actual use.
>>
>> Sascha
>>
>> [1] http://wiki.debian.org/Sugar
>
> hi,
>
> i have a marvell mutimedia tablet(not a development kit) running android 1.6
> which really sucks. it also uses pxa168 mohawk avenger same as the devices you
> ported i think, i want to help in testing sugar in my tablet.can you help me how
> to start?i know you posted howtos on metastudio. but im not sure how to transfer
> files from tftp since mine is not a development kit(no serial but has 1 usb and
> 1 mini usb and it shows /dev/sg2 for android. i would love to hear from you
> guys. kudos to the team who made sugar posible on marvell pxa168. correct me
> guys if im wrong, everything starts from booting uboot right which i also don't
> know if it is posible to put it on the tablet im using. supporting and
> innovating education for kids is really one of the most significant that we
> should lookup to. :)
>
> ps: if your curious about the looks here is the link http://tablet-
> news.com/2010/01/09/ces-2010-marvell-multimedia-tablet-made-for-third-parties-
> disappointing/marvell-multimedia-tablet-stand/
>

Sorry I saw this message only today.

You need a serial connection to your laptop/desktop to access uboot.
Once you get access you can load kernel and rootfs.  I was trying the
link above, but the page could not be found.   Our device had two
slots for memory, one was microSD slot, and the other is a regular SD
card slot.  We used a SD card to serial interface board, using which
we connected to a desktop with serial port.  On the desktop we used
minicom to connect and configure the uboot.  If you have this then you
can move forward to the next stage.

You can start the machine while you are connected through the serial
port using the minicom and halt regular booting when you get uboot
prompt.

In the third stage you can try to dump kernel image and rootfs image
to the flash.  I can send you a link from where you can download the
kernel and rootfs that we have used.

I decided not to go further, when I realized that it is very difficult
to use key-board shortcuts on a touch screen such as C-c or C-v or
others.   We do not have enough time to do all this hacking so gave it
up.  With an external keyboard we were able to work with several sugar
activities.

And last, the kernel we compiled could not work with the wireless
card, though all other hardware were working.  But, this machine does
have full support in the linux kernel.  so it is a matter of doing a
few iterations to get this working fully.

--
GN