Unofficial Ubuntu 13 04 image with 3d Mali drivers

[isidoro]

I found this post http://www.gplsquared.com/eoma_boot/eoma_boot.html#Ubunt_13_04_3D
and adapted image to olinuxino, and it worked.

linaro_13_4_aolinuxino-a20.img.xz - https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5o2FZvy5RcnSHhwX082blY3c0E/edit?usp=sharing

details:
User: jm
pass: jm

Hdmi out : 1360x768 ( you can adjust in  uEnv.txt)
I's a 5.2 Gig file system, so you need to write on a 8 Gig sd card.
I used win32diskimager to make img file and seven zip to compress into xz file.

[Mouchon]

thanks for the share :-)

[zolivem]

I tried this unofficial Ubuntu on my A20 but it doesn't work.
I just copied the image on a 16GB uSD (everything seems good, I obtained 2 partitions fat16 and ext4)
When I boot my A20 with this uSD, nothing happens (just the red light, no greend light and no ouput to my HDMI screen).
I tried to copy the scipt.bin and script_a20_linux_HDMI_sd.fex files from the script_a20_linux_HDMI_sd directory to the root directory of the fat16 partition, but I obtained the same behaviour.
My A20 works well with the official Debian image.

Did I missed something to do ?
Thanks for your answer.

[Lurch]

Must be your sdcard. I copied it to 8GB sdcard and it worked fine.
Try another card?

[zolivem]

I tried with a 8GB uSD and it works now !
I'm sure I tried before with this uSD but I changed the power supply too since because I've noticed non stable behavior with the official Debian ... may be the conjonction of the both changes.
Thanks a lot for your suggestion Lurch.

[jmss]

Hi,

This image does not seem to fit my 8 GB card:

$ su -c "xzcat linaro_13_4_aolinuxino-a20.img.xz | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=4M"
Password:
dd: writing '/dev/sdb': No space left on device
0+871110 records in
0+871109 records out
7822376960 bytes (7,8 GB) copied, 705,741 s, 11,1 MB/s

Any hints?

[isidoro]

@jmss

it's due to different brand of cards, yours has fewer sectors than the average.
Regardless, I think the card can boot. Have you tried to mounts its two partitions?      

[jmss]

OK, it makes sense.

No, the green LED does not light.

When I insert the card in my laptop there's an error from mount. I only see partition BB7C-505C.

Anyway, this is strange because "I's a 5.2 Gig file system, so you need to write on a 8 Gig sd card."

[isidoro]

try to explode first the file with sevenZip and then use dd  without the "bs=4M" option.

Other way, the most safe, is to mount filesistems in loop mode, then copy it on a fresh created partition (one of 16M the fat one e one that fill the remasining space of the sdcard)

[jmss]

try to explode first the file with sevenZip and then use dd  without the "bs=4M" option.

I've thought of that and tried it before, but it didn't solve it. bs is just an upper limit, so if there are fewer bytes to write, dd will only write the missing ones. Uncompressing the image reveals an image larger than what the SD card can hold.

Other way, the most safe, is to mount filesistems in loop mode, then copy it on a fresh created partition (one of 16M the fat one e one that fill the remasining space of the sdcard)

Thanks for the suggestion. I was forgetting that one thing is the partition size and other is the files size. I tried resizing the partition in gparted, but it does not allow it. So I did this:

• mount the rootfs partition from the image file
• copied its files to another directory
• (re)created the rootfs partition in the card
• copied all files into it

The green LED does not light, but this time the board is up and I could successfully login.

[jmss]

Something that I observed with this image is that in my project the C/C++ code runs about twice as faster comparing to Debian Unstable.

I was using the official Debian image and upgraded to Testing and then to Unstable to make it as close as possible to Ubuntu 13.04.

Do you think this performance improvement is due to moving:

  - from Debian Unstable to Ubuntu/Linaro or
  - from Debian/Ubuntu to Linaro?

Thanks.

[wizard3001]

Hi

Do you have audio, on your devices running on this distro. I've tried alot of things but no luck.

I someone has a clue how to fix the audio it will be great. 

[jmss]

Hi,

Do you have audio, on your devices running on this distro. I've tried alot of things but no luck.

I think I managed to play the WAVE file that comes with the Official Debian image (?) and I can also play, e.g.:

  $ mplayer ./code/gambas/trunk/examples/examples/Games/Concent/Paddle.wav

with the current Ubuntu 13.10 (I have upgraded with do-release-upgrade).

[isidoro]

Something that I observed with this image is that in my project the C/C++ code runs about twice as faster comparing to Debian Unstable.

how did you measure it?

Do you think this performance improvement is due to moving:

  - from Debian Unstable to Ubuntu/Linaro or
  - from Debian/Ubuntu to Linaro?

Nice question. I think this question is to forward to whom effectively made it, on the original link.
By me, I think is a matter of some kind of flags used to optimize code build.

[jmss]

how did you measure it?

With Python's time.time() in a script who invoked the C code.

Nice question. I think this question is to forward to whom effectively made it, on the original link.
By me, I think is a matter of some kind of flags used to optimize code build.

Afterwards, I concluded it is due to Linaro's gcc optimizations, since the binary programs did not show any improvements, only the code that I recompile.