Mele A1000

[bogen]

A windows executealbe... great.... From a Linux site for a Linux device... seeing as I don't have any Windows installs in my house, if I got a Mele A1000 that tool would likely be useless to me for unbricking it if I needed to use it. (Unless it works on wine).

[falker]

I am not sure how the instructions apply to the mele a1000 anyway.

[Conn]

All right,

I'll make it brief; the device seems great! Comes with Android 2.3.2 and the machine runs flawlessly. Tried a bunch of videos and images just to see the reaction of the hardware and it plays full HD movies without a glitch. I've even tried a 11GB Star Wars BDrip and it was spot on superb.

I've also found out that the device tries to boot from the SD first, so no need to add GRUB or change an address on boot record.

Good news about reviving the machine came from Puppy Linux guys; Barry Kauler has done a terrific job porting Puppy to Mele A1000. His version derived from Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. It boots from a 4GB SD card and as I've already stated above you don't need to modify the flash inside.

That's it for now. As a conclusion I recommend getting one, I'll try to port Arch but I am a little bit short of time...

Cheers,
Conn

[bnolsen]

I should probably update. I've had arch linux running nicely on the mele a1000. At the moment X11 is not running due to lack of fb driver.

What I did at the time:

follow instructions from here to install a minimal debian image:

http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/a10_image/

that involves getting and installing these images:

http://hands.com/~lkcl/mele_uboot.img
http://hands.com/~lkcl/mele_boot_part.cpio.gz
http://hands.com/~lkcl/mele_debian_armh ... al.cpio.gz

I made sure the debian image booted.

Then, I remounted on PC, made a tarball of /lib/modules/3.0.8+.
I wiped the debian partition, grabbed the latest OMAP image:

http://archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM ... est.tar.gz

extracted that onto the sdcard, then extracted the 3.0.8+ modules onto that.

Arch linux boots just fine into the system (you definitely need a usb tty device).

I then downloaded the kernel from

https://github.com/amery/linux-allwinner/

built it (had make some gcc-4.7 specific fixes) "make uImage", copied uImage to the uboot partition and booted the kernel. This creates a 3.0.31+ kernel.

So this is all a bit ugly. I've had some personal things to deal with in addition to real work so I haven't fixed this up yet.

Just for fun I compiled jagged alliance 2 stracciatella branch, copied over the data files and ran it over a tunnelled X11 ssh connection. Everything seems to be running stable.

Update: changed the order of the module loading and have 1280x720-60 framebuffer working. It overscans on my monitor here though, but seems to be working. Sound over HDMI isnt' yet though.

[drynish]

Mine is on the way (15-34 days), I truly hope that you'll have succeded to move it to archlinux (easily) so that I can have a box that is really reliable, wifi, hdmi what a wonderfull box for only 70$

Good luck guys and let me know if you need something. I might be able to help you

Michel

[johnnyvibrant]

I would be incredibly surprised if it is really reliable, i've had my fair share of chinese gadgets and whilst they have been fun none have been that reliable

[Conn]

Surprise surprise!!! Mine's not booting anymore... China!

Conn

[Conn]

Tried everything possible before "penetrating into the board"

Even tried to boot it from SD. When I try to boot from SD none of the output device shows anything. So I can't even understand if it boots or not. If I try to boot it from internal flash, it just prints "Loading Please Wait" and stays like this forever.

Has anyone tried to take out the guts and do a lobotomy?

Cheers,
Conn

[drynish]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Conn', 'T')ried everything possible before "penetrating into the board"

Even tried to boot it from SD. When I try to boot from SD none of the output device shows anything. So I can't even understand if it boots or not. If I try to boot it from internal flash, it just prints "Loading Please Wait" and stays like this forever.

Has anyone tried to take out the guts and do a lobotomy?

Cheers,
Conn

[Conn]

I don't wanna blame all Chinese products but this is number two that had become an expensive paper weight in less than a month.

I'll try CPR and call back. In the meantime if anyone has any ideas it'll help a lot.

Conn