ALARM on Samsung ARM Chromebook

Install Arch Linux ARM on other devices.

Re: ALARM on Samsung ARM Chromebook

Postby bodhi » Tue Oct 23, 2012 4:15 am

Wow! this is fantastic for a Linux notebook.
bodhi
 
Posts: 225
Joined: Sat Aug 13, 2011 10:06 am

Re: ALARM on Samsung ARM Chromebook

Postby cbg0 » Sun Nov 04, 2012 9:47 am

Will arch linux work on this device? I'm thinking of buying one but ChromeOS is just lacking.
cbg0
 
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Nov 04, 2012 9:46 am

Re: ALARM on Samsung ARM Chromebook

Postby xenoxaos » Fri Nov 09, 2012 10:51 pm

I think crimsonredmk's made some progress....I've got *cough* ubuntu *cough* on mine just for testing. But other than that, the biggest contribution the chromebook has made has been a lcd transplant with my laptop.
Arch Linux ARM exists and continues to grow through community support, please donate today!
xenoxaos
Developer
 
Posts: 323
Joined: Thu Jan 06, 2011 1:45 am

Re: ALARM on Samsung ARM Chromebook

Postby Goophy » Wed Nov 14, 2012 9:40 pm

Has anyone done anything with arch on it yet?

Any way around using the ChromeOS kernel + modules and an arch rootfs for accelerated graphics?

Got mine today and can't wait to play around a bit. Would be nice to continue if anyone already has done some work already.

I miss function, insert, home and end-buttons, but everything else looks awesome!
Goophy
 
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Aug 26, 2012 1:44 pm

Re: ALARM on Samsung ARM Chromebook

Postby xenoxaos » Wed Nov 14, 2012 9:47 pm

I have it running using their kernel/modules/firmare. There is no acceleration right now because they built against an older version of X. Maybe next week over turkey, I'll work up a rootfs/install process.
Arch Linux ARM exists and continues to grow through community support, please donate today!
xenoxaos
Developer
 
Posts: 323
Joined: Thu Jan 06, 2011 1:45 am

Re: ALARM on Samsung ARM Chromebook

Postby relghuar » Thu Nov 29, 2012 9:33 pm

After a few days playing from SD card I've gone berserk today and installed arch linux directly on emmc :-) Pretty painless actually, just booted from USB, created clear GPT on /dev/mmcblk0, added 3 partitions (kern-a/kern-b/root, I've managed to do it with gdisk only, although attributes were a bit complicated), copied rootfs content from SD to new ext4 root, built kernel image with root=/dev/mmcblk0p3, wrote it to mmcblk0p1 and p2, and voila :-) it actually booted! I strongly recommend copying content of original chromium rootfs (ROOT-A for example, I think it's /dev/mmcblk0p3 in chromeos), it can come in handy if you'll need to rebuild kernel. If copied correctly it's actually possible to chroot into it from arch...
Power management mostly works, the only problems I found so far is disabled display after X DPMS power saving (the only way to turn it back on was to get in over ssh, run pm-suspend and wake the machine up with a key press), and a bit funny behaviour of upowerd when I unplug the adapter when battery is full (it keeps on showing adapter connected, but it works correctly if I plug power back in and out after a while when battery power goes a bit down).
Display brightness plugin in xfce4 works perfectly, and as I had to disable DPMS in X I have added a few lines to /etc/acpi/actions/lm_lid.sh to turn backlight fully off/on on lid close/open.
Touchpad works fine, it's a bit big for my taste and even after I enabled the option to turn it off while typing, I still manage to activate it accidentally when I don't press any key (found no fix yet for having big hands). Right-click works now with two-finger-click (and middle with three-finger), see http://blogs.arm.com/software-enablemen ... hromebook/ step 14.
Keyboard had to be tweaked a bit with loadkeys and xmodmap to get pgup/pgdn/home/end/delete working in both X and consoles. I haven't done anything about capslock yet, not really that important to me, but shouldn't be a problem to get it working on the funny search key. I'll have to buy some keyboard stickers, at least for F1-F10 keys. Also, I use US layout on a GB-printed keyboard, so there are some more keys out of sync with their labels.
I'm running X with xf86-video-armsoc driver from alarm repository, it's pretty stable (haven't tried hdmi output yet). It has no acceleration, at least for video playing, so 720p h264 2.5Mbps videos are not really playable, much less full-hd.
Sound was mostly easy, at least on speakers. I had to play a bit with alsamixer to get correct combination of mute/unmute on quite many channels available. I haven't found a way to control speakers and headphones volume separately, actually it's not even possible to mute the one without the other the usual way. The only thing I can do is to manipulate mixer controls "Left Speaker Left DAC1", "Left Headphone Left DAC1" (and corresponding Right/Right alternatives), these are just on/off switches that allow me to turn each channel on both headphones and speakers on/off separately, so I can effectively turn off speakers and listen on headphones only.
I'll have to check chromium-os and exynos arndale board source codes for any hardware video decoding drivers, those are a must for any serious video playing, but other than that I have a pretty fully functional little notebook :-)
relghuar
 
Posts: 18
Joined: Sun Nov 18, 2012 3:51 pm

Re: ALARM on Samsung ARM Chromebook

Postby WarheadsSE » Thu Nov 29, 2012 10:35 pm

xf86-video-armsoc
Core Developer
Remember: Arch Linux ARM is entirely community donation supported!
WarheadsSE
Developer
 
Posts: 6807
Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2010 2:12 pm

Re: ALARM on Samsung ARM Chromebook

Postby m0g » Sun Dec 02, 2012 12:00 pm

Hey,

I do have an arm chromebook as well and have been playing around with Ubuntu raring for the last weeks. Since I use i3wm on it and have no intention to install unity, I would like to give a try to archlinuxarm.

Could you maybe be kind enough to provide me link to the proper rootfs to download in order to install archlinux on my tiny little laptop ?

Thanks

Edit: Sorry, I found this out http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7 ... chromebook
m0g
 
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Dec 02, 2012 11:55 am

Re: ALARM on Samsung ARM Chromebook

Postby xenoxaos » Sun Dec 02, 2012 5:27 pm

XFCE performs really well. I'm in the process of trying to get some other stuff figured out for a completely set up XFCE image as well.
Arch Linux ARM exists and continues to grow through community support, please donate today!
xenoxaos
Developer
 
Posts: 323
Joined: Thu Jan 06, 2011 1:45 am

Re: ALARM on Samsung ARM Chromebook

Postby stronnag » Wed Dec 05, 2012 7:18 pm

Thanks to all the contributors to this thread for the clues (and the rootfs). Running Gnome-Shell with xf86-video-armsoc. Delightful device.
stronnag
 
Posts: 44
Joined: Sat Sep 22, 2012 6:51 am

Next

Return to [Please read announcement] Community-Supported Devices

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 3 guests