TrimSlice install notes

[dcecile]

Hi all! Kudos for the work put into this; it's real nice to have my TrimSlice boot into a familiar Arch Linux environment.

It really wasn't too hard to set up for the first boot, but maybe some adjustments could be made to the installation docs?

1) My TrimSlice has an SSD inside it, and no matter what ext2load settings I used (0:2, 1:1), I couldn't get the TrimSlice to boot from my USB stick. (I have no clue how to get to a uboot console to debug this.) An extra warning might be helpful along the lines of "just use an SD card if you have an SSD, to save yourself the headache." Once I tried an SD card, it worked the first time.

2) The docs say "unmount /arch, and boot it". This was a bit confusing to read the first time. First, I don't think unmounting is required if you use "sudo reboot". Second, "boot it" probably means "reboot, and hope that the TrimSlice boots into Arch Linux ARM".

3) Once Arch Linux booted, the screen was blank. Luckily my network has a simple DHCP setup and I have access to the router. I found out that the machine name was "alarm", and ssh'd in using user "root" and password "root".

4) To get graphics running, I needed to start X. This required both xorg-server and libgl. For a simple DE, I tried xorg-xinit and xorg-twm. With all these packages installed, graphics worked OK. An extra note about these packages would be nice.

I haven't installed Arch on the main SDD, but I don't expect any further installation or boot problems.

P.S. Here is the subject of the forum's activation email: Welcome to ""

[kmihelich]

Things could probably be clarified. Use the cable that came with your kit to get serial via the mini-USB port on the front. You'll need a null serial cable/dongle, as it's not already configured in that way. Using serial will let you see the whole boot process and interact with it.

For better display, installed the package nvidia-trimslice which has the xorg drivers for tegra.

[pepedog]

I noticed micro sd didn't work on my pro, and same probably on H models (if drive fitted), but thought uBoot had moved on

[dcecile]

The X11 problems I originally thought were because of libgl, were actually because I had both the HDMI and DVI cables plugged into the same monitor (for Ubuntu framebuffer consoles). With this setup, sometimes X11 fails to start up. (Unplugging the DVI cable makes everything work fine.) By the way, nvidia-trimslice was included in the latest rootfs.

I hooked up a null modem serial cable, and that gave me full access to the boot process, including a U-Boot console. Poking around with "usb part" showed me that my USB stick is actually on "controller 0", not on the default "controller 1". It seems like only one controller can be started at a time, using the "usb start" command.

Because my version of U-Boot (2010.09-00172-g1c59bc2-dirty May 18 2011 - 19:59:51) uses "controller 1" for the default boot, the only way I can boot from USB stick is by punching in the commands manually. This copy-paste is actually much more convenient for one-time-use than compiling a boot.src file. Here are the commands:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
setenv bootargs 'root=/dev/sdb1 rw rootwait console=tty1 console=ttyS0,115200n8 mem=384M@0M mem=512M@512M nvmem=128M@384M vmalloc=248M nohdparm noinitrd init=/sbin/init rootwait loglevel=8 video=tegrafb'
usb start 0
ext2load usb 0:1 4080000 /boot/uImage
bootm 4080000
')

As for the microSD, isn't that only used during firmware (U-Boot) recovery and upgrades? I had no trouble on my TrimSlice Pro booting from a regular SD card.

[pepedog]

No, full size card for uBoot flash, holding button by micro card the whole time of about 30 seconds untill power light blinks