Netbook Pro I've found a working linux distro!

PS Thanks to oldman for the info on making the drivers visible to the kernel.

Paul Krupa

Erasing the flash ROM's without BooStDongle

Here is a solution for erasing the flash ROM's: Put the attached file renamed to nBkPro.img on a FAT16 formated CF card and do not have any other files on that card. Run the card on the NBP this way: Reset, press Ctrl+D+ESC, insert card.

(I have erased my flash ROM's, because now the NBP automatically boots from CF card, on which I have my Linux)




Attachments
----------------
nBkPro.img.FlashROMEraser (0KB - 88 downloads)

This is what I did last night
1; I put nBkProOs.img from LX sources (netbook-linux-sources.tgz) on fat16 partition on my CF.
2: I extracted soho-image-netbook-pro-20050104074212.rootfs.tar.bz2 into second primary ex2 partition. about 180Mb.
3: Booted to Boost and inserted inserted the card.
4: I had Netbook Pro LX logo displayed while loading, after a while I had black screen with gpe cross on it that i could move around and that was it...

I cannot say what went wrong because my serial doesn't work still. I get gibberish on my hyper terminal in widows (linux laptop has no com port). My settings are as described in boostdongle.pdf...
oldman: was I doing the right thing? Thanks for advice about adding modules, airo_cs is missing anyhow, I broke a leg looking for it on the internet and could not find it... anyone has th airo_cs.ko for kernel 2.6.9 or can i use another driver from Cisco aironet 350 ? My PCMCIA ethernet card works... That's about it for now...

Eddie how are the things going?

I tried something similar to Salmonito except that I only loaded the kernel. The last serial message was it was looking for hda2. So I will load extract to hda2 and see what happens.

Linux (none) 2.6.9-rc1-bk18-nb1 #1 Tue Jan 4 02:27:32 GMT 2005 armv5tel unknown

Paul

cool

@salmonito:

Yes, I think you were doing the right things. Maybe you also want to try http://linuxtogo.org/~florian/nBkProOs.img_cf (renamed to nBkProOs.img). It has airo_cs.ko in its initrd.

Sweet! Thank you!

I am running the LX version on my netbook pro!! I used the Florian image NetbookOS and untarred the LX stuff to a cf card. It took a while to boot and there were quite a few comments (on the serial output) that looked catastrophic but it went all the way. I'll try to get my wifi next.

Paul

Paul, great how does it look? Just like other gpe images? do you get firefox and the rest of the stuff? How fast is it?

I plugged my orinoco wireless card in and it found it all by itself. I configured for my network, started firefox (it took a minute) and queried google and lo and behold I'm connected. This interface is very clean.
Paul

How fast if everything compared to linux in nand?

It's hard to say. The apps take awhile to load, at least the major ones. Web pages render fairly quickly.

I can't log into hpcfactor because I don't see the verification code with this browser.

I had a ton of problems getting it on disk. I think the unit is very finicky about cf cards. I was about to give up after several attempts with my cards. I'm not the most fluent linux person and getting the card formatted and the files untarred was rather convoluted. I kept getting unable to access messages when it tried to look at hda. Needless to say, I finally found one it liked. I only mention this in case others are having similar problems; try another card.

The linneghborhood app (file and print sharing) seems very slow. I think if this is going to stay something will need to be done to address the access time.

Paul

So how does the swap file work if you boot from the cf? How is the memory used?

Paul,

Great news getting the LX version running! How did you set up the CF? One partition of FAT16? Two? Did you use ext2? Looking forward to trying this out -- though don't know if I can just yet... only have 128MB CF cards at my disposal for the moment...

Also going to see about replacing the RAM in my laptop so I can do builds, but I've already done it once not too long ago, and I'm not too thrilled about spending money on it again.

Once we get the basics worked out about partitioning and setting up CF cards, I'll work on a script to automate the process (prompt for images to use, etc).

I followed oldman's suggestions with a small dos partition, just enough for the image, about 5 mbytes. I made part 2 200 ext2. I used part 3 to take up the rest of a 1 gb card. Like I said earlier, I was having a hard time with the cards and I tried to keep it down to size.
There's a ton of stuff on the disk. You can probably whittle it down and fit it on 128mb by trimming some of the apps.

Paul

I have to go out. I am curious to explore the error messages but I have been obsessed with this install and have been spending way too much time on it.