I managed to install archlinux ARM on my Efika MX. Most of the smartbook is working, except for
- Changing screen brightness (not figured out how to do it yet)
- Video acceleration: Doesn’t work well, but it’s not worse than in the official Efika Ubuntu image, so…
The relevant tutorials are:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~steev/efika/arm/install.xmlhttp://wiki.debian.org/EfikaMX#DefaultU-BootEnvironmentI just post here some remarks about the gentoo tutorial that would have saved me some time, in order:
* filesystems: I used ext2, ext4 for respectively the boot and the root partition.
* extract gentoo stage3…: you have to extract the content of the latest archlinux arm omap rootfs instead (obviously)
* You can forget about /etc/inittab and /etc/securetty: If you don’t, just remember that /dev/tty1 is the screen, the debug console is correctly indicated in the tuto.
* you need the mkimage program, you can obtain it by pacman -S uboot-mkimage (or something like that, pacman -Ss uboot if is not correct)
* The last kernel git for efika is now on github (see efika dev blog). I suggest you to clone it from another machine and put in on a harddrive that you will connect to the smartbook with usb. It’s faster.
* Do a pacman -S base-devel, to have the necessary tools to compile the kernel.
* After make mx51_efikamx_defconfig, do a make menuconfig and add support for ext2,ext3 and ext4 in the uImage (i.e. NOT module). We’re not using any initramdisk here.
* Then compile the kernel: make uImage modules modules_install.
* Install other packages, like netcfg (for the wifi), whatever package you might want. Then reboot, let the SD card in the efika MX, and it should work.