Adam Borowski <kilob...@angband.pl> (2013-08-14): > I loathe laptops, and thus didn't own one. Needing one for DebConf (and > this time no friend had a working one for me to borrow), instead of getting > an used x86 one, I bought a $150 13.3" android thing. Because, you know, > installing a certain universal operating system should be easy, especially > if it's a popular SoC (Allwinner) and graphics chip (Mali 400), right? > Oh naive me.
What?! Somebody needs to do some work before new hardware is supported? Shocking. > It took me way too much time to figure it out, and I'm not exactly a > Debian newbie (although no experience with laptops or arm bootloaders). > The main block was no way to reflash the machine to a working state, > making me afraid to touch the nand bootloader in a non-obvious way. That > is, until I learned that Allwinners boot first from a sd card; all you > need to do is to put an ubooted kernel into the right place and copy > appropriate code into sectors before the first partition. Sounds... > familiar. That's not enough, of course, as without a module "lcd" there's > no display, etc -- debugging which requires moving the sd card, plopping > qemu-static-arm onto it and installing sshd. Same for trying anything > else. > > Now imagine a regular user trying that... > > So, whom do I beat with this laptop to get d-i working? > > Looks like a substantial part of Allwinner drivers got converted to DT in > 3.8, 3.10 and 3.11 kernels, so it might work without a device-specific > kernel. > > Thus, if anyone would like to play with such an exotic laptop, feel free > to either catch me on debconf, or send me d-i images to test... It's an > Omega OAN133, not a widespread piece of hardware, but we need to do > something with incoming flood of Chromebooks and so on. Since you're “not exactly a Debian newbie” maybe you could have figured out that mailing -boot/-kernel might be a nice first bet, right? Also, thanks for the “why the hell isn't shiny new hardware working out of the box” attitude. Not amused, KiBi. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130813230735.gb25...@mraw.org
