On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 9:04 AM, Denis Gottardello <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello everybody. Can you explain me how to install Debian Lenny on this Arm > board?
> http://www.bolymin.com.tw/Embeddeddetail.asp?productid=183 denis, hi, it's complicated: you can expect to spend full-time six to twelve weeks, reverse-engineering the hardware. you start by buying one; you open it up and see if it has a JTAG port easily accessible. you create a wiki page on e.g. handhelds.org, elinux.org or anywhere, and you record the status of your reverse-engineering progress. you photograph all ICs and place them online. you then ask people to help identify the chips. you then download HARET (or gnuharet) and you also download the Microsoft MSVC ARM compiler (which does run under Wine, successfully) in order to compile HARET.EXE (or you can cross-compile gnuharet). you then use HARET.EXE or gnuharet under WINCE to poke around in the memory of the machine, looking for the addresses of the hardware. once you have done this, you can begin to build a linux kernel, which you can start up in-memory using HARET.EXE or gnuharet (just like LOADLIN.EXE used to be used for, under DOS and Win95, on x86 systems). with a little luck and a lot of patience, after you have spent six to twelve weeks full-time reverse-engineering the hardware and you have the linux kernel on the machine, you can then put any linux distribution of your choice onto the machine. however i recommend that you begin with a very large "initial ramdisk" - initrd - into which you place e.g. dropbear (embedded ssh server), usb gadget ethernet (if the ARM926 supports it), the ethernet driver etc. you can then log in to the system, remotely, without having to reverse-engineer or touch the NAND flash. the initrd can be loaded by HARET.EXE or gnuharet into memory (under WINCE) and this will jump-start you into a semi-working system, with a prompt, where you will then be able to poke around, load and unload experimental modules by scp'ing them over to the linux system running in-memory, from the initrd. i did this for the HTC blueangel when i was reverse-engineering that device: it worked very well as it saved on boot time. i was able to experiment loading and unloading the LCD screen driver and the touchscreen driver, and it cut the development time from years to months. yes, you heard me correctly: i did say it cut the reverse-engineering development time from years to months. l. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
