How to improve our Linux images?

mossroy · July 20, 2014, 05:30:22 PM

Please enable kernel upgrades for security patches, through apt-get.
On a "classical" debian installation, these upgrades are provided by debian, through their standard repositories.
On Olinuxino debian image it does not (at least on A20), certainly because of the patches applied to the kernel.

It makes it difficult to enforce security at the kernel level. A solution might be to provide a repository from Olimex, where kernel upgrades would be deployed?

spelle · July 21, 2014, 02:44:36 PM

Hi there ! :-)

No particular needs, but I think I would be nice to have a procedure/tutorial allowing the user to generate an image, like it is the case for the Linaro project.

So that, the user could clone or fork the image, add his customizations, embedd it applications, etc...

Could be good to have several flavours as well : Debian minimal, Debian desktop, Debian server, Ubuntu core/minimal, Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu Server, Arch Linux, Fedora, Tiny Core, etc...

HTH

tlhingan · July 21, 2014, 05:32:47 PM

Quote from: spelle on July 21, 2014, 02:44:36 PM
No particular needs, but I think I would be nice to have a procedure/tutorial allowing the user to generate an image, like it is the case for the Linaro project.

Try this --> http://olimex.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/building-the-ultimate-debian-sd-card-for-linux-with-kernel-3-4-for-a20-olinuxino-micro/

spelle · July 21, 2014, 06:11:40 PM

Yep. I already went through it. I was thinking on giving the possibility to the user to build, customize, adjust to its needs the "rootfs" itself.

spelle · July 21, 2014, 06:18:34 PM

Ok. Just saw this, dated from today : http://olimex.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/how-to-create-bare-minimum-debian-wheezy-rootfs-from-scratch/

Cool, I will try this soon ! :-)

ar · July 21, 2014, 09:27:00 PM

Cornered by some suggestions so...

no pre-installed non-free bits please. for those that insist why not have a dummy package that installs all the non-free bits you want like you usb wifi products (why are you selling ones that required non-free blobs when there is N wifi usb dongle that you could sell instead?)
I don't want non-free graphics when there is working accelerated FLOSS drivers/firmware, please put energies into that.

I belive sd cards have some unformatted space at the begging which is specially reversed, I read an article explaining it but now I have forgotten. I forgot about this property until after I went and flashed you image onto my sd card and now the write speeds are poorer (this was a meant to be a better uSD card! http://www.mobymemory.co.uk/microsdhc-4gb-32gb/5304-lexar-16gb-90mb-s-600x-micro-sdhc-class-10-memory-card-usb-30-reader-650590182213.html ) . I don't know if one can repartition it to get it back to how it was before and besides I can't remember many MB's it was . Maybe provide lzip's of the 2 partitions and a script to make it boot able? instead of a image?
I would love to have 2 screen at the same time or to switch between them without rebooting using standard tools like desktop environments display settings gui
vp8/9 video accelerated (some sort of software/work exists but I can't find the link)
theora video acceleration?

oskaratk · July 22, 2014, 06:56:08 AM

IMHO, it is not just about the image.

It is also about to develop custom software for the boards

But, for someone coming from a non-Linux world it is pretty difficult to piece all the bits together.
For example to install a development IDE ( Which one, btw ??) - just command line, nano and fire up gcc, that is not productive developing.

So, I would love to see some howtos :
Setup an development IDE on the board
Setup a cross compiler on a Linux or Windows system with remote debugging on/for the A20

bottom line, or in other words: Make the entry to work/develop with A20 easy. Happy customers are your best advertisers

Thanks for considering
Oskar

JohnS · July 22, 2014, 09:42:15 AM

Oskar - I wonder if people will read such things.

Most if not all are already on the net but people seem not to look. (The same tends to be true of the Olimex wiki, product pages, github, wordpress, etc.)

Of course, lots of people do not want an IDE (think about Linux authors) or a particular kind of debugger, but others find such as Eclipse & OpenOCD without hardship.

Still, if someone puts a very detailed article on the wiki maybe future questions can be answered with RTFM (er, RTFW - which works now if W is web).

John

Chax · July 22, 2014, 11:22:04 AM

I would like the images to be smaller by design. This is twofold:

1. The images are 4 GB but the Kingston 4 GB cards that I use are always a little bit smaller than the images from Olimex. This results in not only a partition table that is outside the boundaries of the card and also a filesystem that expects the card to be larger than it is. So images of 3.9 GB or something that would fit on any 4 GB card, would be a lot easier.

2. The images now have a lot of free space. I myself would prefer to keep the image small, so writing to SD card does take very little time. After booting I can resize the last partition to the size of the card and then resize the filesystem accordingly.

Option 2 is maybe a bit more advanced for some users, but option 1 would be nice.

JohnS · July 22, 2014, 06:38:38 PM

You can resize on Linux.

I'd just buy a larger SD card - very cheap!

John

cro · July 23, 2014, 04:52:01 PM

@Linux-Images: Please disable the screensaver.

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1751 root 20 0 41752 21m 7528 S 48.4 6.0 2:23.91 Xorg
2333 olimex 30 10 4440 2076 1156 S 16.1 0.6 0:40.01 galaxy

martinayotte · July 23, 2014, 06:10:33 PM

You can disable current screensaver using the following commands :

Code Select

/usr/bin/xset dpms 0 0 0
/usr/bin/xset s off

gizmo98 · July 28, 2014, 08:46:24 PM

-Cannot update to debian jessie. Kernel is too old (new udev package is not compatible).
-Linux kernel with r3p2-rel1 mali kernel module.
-Mali userspace libs with r3p2 support.
-Fixed /etc/hosts file. The username is wrong (compare with /etc/host.conf).
sed -i 's/a20_OLinuXino/a20-OLinuXino/g' /etc/hosts
-glmark2-es2 does not use mali useland libs. Delete or move mesa libGLES and libEGL files.
sudo mkdir /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/bak
sudo mv /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libGLES* /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/bak
sudo mv /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libEGL* /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/bak

oskaratk · July 29, 2014, 08:45:34 PM

Quote from: JohnS on July 22, 2014, 09:42:15 AM
Oskar - I wonder if people will read such things.

Most if not all are already on the net but people seem not to look. (The same tends to be true of the Olimex wiki, product pages, github, wordpress, etc.)

Of course, lots of people do not want an IDE (think about Linux authors) or a particular kind of debugger, but others find such as Eclipse & OpenOCD without hardship.

Still, if someone puts a very detailed article on the wiki maybe future questions can be answered with RTFM (er, RTFW - which works now if W is web).

John

John,

fact is, if I have to search the web and then put pieces together, how much time and effort does this take?
I think I am not the only one who cannot afford days and weeks before I become productive in a new environment.
I need to spend my time to create solutions and make a living :-)

Just my 2c

Oskar

syntax3rror · July 29, 2014, 09:07:54 PM

Quote from: olimex on July 16, 2014, 11:22:48 AM
Should we enable DHCP or use fixed IP for the Ethernet, do you see something wrong with the current default configurations etc.

Since I do not have a monitor with HDMI I would have appreciated if DHCP is used by default. It took some time until it came to my mind to mount the second partition on the SD card to a directory of my workstation and edit $MOUNTPOINT/etc/network/interfaces

I was a bit irritated by a user "olimex" consuming quite a lot of ressources after boot.

Sebastian