Installing on ARCHOS 101 G9

[Quintus]

Hi there,

I’ve been running Arch Linux on my desktop and laptop for some years now and recently I bought an ARCHOS 101 G9 tablet which doesn’t have a locked bootloader, which should make alternative installations possible. It has an OMAP4 dualcore processor by Texas Instruments (ARMv7 AFAIK).

I already installed the "special developer edition firmware" ARCHOS provides here and indeed I now have an option to "flash kernel and initramfs". I’m however a bit unsure how to continue. Arch Linux ARM’s pages tell that if I want to use the generic ARMv7 tarballs for OMAP4, I have to compile Linux, which I’ve figured shouldn’t be too difficult (after all, it’s just a cross-compilation). And even better, ARCHOS provides a (unsupported, semi-official) demo system with a Linux kernel build tree here (kernel version is 3.0.8) plus some surroundings here. I’ve compiled GCC to cross-compile to arm-eabi:

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$ LANG=en_US.utf8 arm-eabi-gcc --version
arm-eabi-gcc (GCC) 4.7.0
Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

And tried to compile that kernel with

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$ ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-eabi- make zImage modules

It failed with

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arch/arm/mm/proc-v7.S:391: Error: selected processor does not support ARM mode `smc #0'

which left me totally helpless so I thought I’d use the precompiled ARM OMAP kernel plus initramfs from Ubuntu, ensured the files were properly compressed (the flashing software expects a GZIP-compressed kernel and an LZOP-compressed initramfs), but it failed with the message that the kernel was too big.
Next I thought I try the vanilla Linux kernel from kernel.org, but after half a day of configuring the kernel it failed on compilation with the exact same error message shown above for the vendor kernel. I suspected my kernel configuration to be incorrect (as this is the first time I try to compile Linux) and googled a bit, finding that it should be possible to get the kernel configuration from a running Android system by means of the Android SDK and adb by doing

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$ adb pull /proc/config.gz

. However, that file doesn’t exist on my device. There’s a config/ subdirectory, but only readable for root which means I would have to root that device. I’d do it as installing the developer firmware already voided the warranty anyway, but that particular device seems to be a bit complicated and googling for it I always see binary executable files I am supposed to load onto the device which I reject to do as I cannot know what they do without having the sourcecode.

...the above is a short summary of my problems, which in reality have been a bit more complicated (getting ADB to work was a story on its own). I’m not a single step further in my goal to install ArchLinux ARM on the device (except for the developer firmware thing), so I finally came to the conclusion to ask here. So I have a couple of questions to ask: Where to start? Is there something like a list of recommended tests to do whether it is possible at all? And finally, if I can get any kind of kernel compiled: How do I get the filesystem tarball extracted on the device? There are only options for flashing kernel and initramfs. Probably booting the custom kernel and formatting the hard drive from busybox?

You see, I’m quite new to the topic of ARM things. If I’ve taken a complete wrong route, please tell me about it. If you need any further information, I’m going to provide it.

Marvin

[xenoxaos]

So, you will need to build your own kernel. Since they have 3.0.8 available, I would probably start with their sources. Their config file is here http://gitorious.org/archos/archos-gpl- ... nux.config You may have to tweak it a bit.

Cross compiling, I wouldn't be much help. All of my compiling is done natively.

We don't do anything with initrd as well. You could do it, but all of the necessary modules are built into our kernels.

Look around and see if you can actually access the uboot process (or whatever the bootloader is) and be able to interrupt it and configure it. You may be able to tftp your kernel in and/or load it from a SD card.

[Quintus]

Thank you... then I’m going to try to build Linux with their kernel configuration as soon as I resolve this annoying compilation error.

Thanks.
Marvin

[motroxx]

Hi, have you got it running?
I'll try the same at the moment..

[talorno]

maybe you can use the kernel that they are using?

forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1392167

[kdb424]

http://ding34.blogspot.com/2013/05/erro ... s-not.html
That will resolve your issue. Had that problem myself. It has to do with a problem with your cross compiler, but that'll do the job too.