Installing Linux On ARM-Based Netbooks? 179
Posted
by
timothy
from the super-easy dept.
from the super-easy dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I am sure that many other Slashdotters have noticed an increase in ARM-based netbooks over the past several months. For example, the Augen E-Go. It is a widely touted theory that it is impossible to install Linux on one of these notebooks, replacing the commonly installed Windows CE operating system. The sub-$100 netbooks carry decent specs, including 533MHz ARM processor; 128MB DDR RAM; and a 2GB Flash drive, as well as most expected netbook components (USB, Wi-Fi, etc.). I find it hard to believe that a computer with these specs is impossible to hack and install Linux to, but Google searches have been largely unsuccessful in finding proper information. Do any Slashdot readers have experience in installing ARM Linux distros to these cheap netbooks like this? If so, what distros do they recommend?"
(In particular, I wonder if anyone can comment on Ubuntu on ARM.)
This might be useful (Score:5, Informative)
Or.... (Score:2, Informative)
Angstrom Linux [angstrom-d...bution.org]
The trouble... (Score:5, Informative)
Because of the decades-long Wintel monopoly, pretty much any x86 board(with the exception of a few oddball embedded things and OLPCs), boots in almost the same way. Worst case, the ACPI implementation is so shot that you have to boot with -noacpi in order to get the kernel up and running.
ARM devices, though, have had considerable freedom to do their own thing, so long as the vendor provided a BSP that papered over the weirdness enough to run the OS of the customer's choice(historically WinCe/VXworks, more recently this has included Linux). On the plus side, this has meant some fairly interesting capabilities in some of the bootloaders. On the minus side, this has meant a multitude of bootloaders(a few OSS, redboot, u-boot), some fairly common, and some horrid oddball crap that even Google has only heard mentioned a few times.
If you can get the kernel booted, userland is not such a big deal. Debian has had a pretty decent one for a while, and the Ubuntu guys have recently been doing some "suitable for low-rez screens" type polishing. The issue will be figuring out the bootloader. And, of course, there is absolutely no assurance that the drivers for whatever oddball devices are crammed into the cheapo SoiCs in these things exist, or work properly.
If you get to the stage of "what distro do I want", you are ahead of the game.
Re:This might be useful (Score:4, Informative)
Maemo (Score:4, Informative)
There are also several mini linux distributions specially targetted to low ram/hardware (i.e. damn small linux), but not sure if there are ARM ports of them.
Re:This might be useful (Score:2, Informative)
If it's good enough for the Beagleboard, it's good enough for a netbook. Also check Youtube for live demos.
Re:This might be useful (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe; maybe not.
Back in the day (ie, when the MobilePro 780 and similar "netbooks" were about and popular with Linux hackers - maybe 8-9 years ago), there were some non-trivial limitations to booting Linux or a BSD on the devices.
The problem was that there was no way to actually boot Linux natively without chainloading from within CE. Sure, the hardware worked, but the CE ROM address was hardcoded within the "BIOS", and there was no way to circumvent it.
As a result, booting was/is a 5-minute (manual) process due to CE's boot. It's highly cumbersome.
Additionally (and possibly somewhat related), I noticed that around 2004 or so, all of the "mobile computing" or "Borg-like computing" project pages, targeted products, and the like just sort of disappeared. Stuff like the "matchbox PC" from Stanford, twiddler keyboards (think that's what they called them), IR (etc.) keyboards for Palm, et al, and misc. other peripherals became difficult to find. No new products were coming to market in that segment.
Cool project pages where people had some interesting software work for mobile computing (including novel input/output devices) just kind of stopped being updated. Kernel porting and hardware support projects (eg. Linux on the MobilePro 780/880) were abandoned. I don't get it, but I'm going to have to guess that emergence of the first widely accessible smartphones distracted these adventurous types, or the hackable geek-preferred hardware simply dried up. It's really too bad. (Maybe the economy or impending adulthood had somethign to do with it, too?)
That said, I have good news and bad news: the good news is that it looks like the "embedded" computer with a keyboard is coming back (See: Viliv S7). Unfortunately, I also suspect that x86 Intel hardware will dominate the market instead of the "cooler" ARM hardware (OMG, Mooreland is impressive). We'll see how much that matters, but I hope "not very" - and we're able to have our cake and eat it too, despite (because of?) the Intel badging.
My hope (and guess) is that we'll have decently powerful MeeGo/Moblin/Maemo powered cell phones at a reasonable price within two years or so - whether that's what the vendor shipped on them or not.
Re:Why Linux? Why not NetBSD? (Score:0, Informative)
Contrary to what NetBSD advocates like to think, Linux actually runs on a wider variety of hardware than NetBSD does.
In the real world where things that matter happen, there's only one BSD derivative that can claim to be anything near as successful as Linux is -- and that (officially) only runs on hardware from one single manufacturer.
NetBSD (Score:3, Informative)
Or OpenBSD.
Plenty useable.
Re:The trouble... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:NetBSD (Score:3, Informative)
Hmm. Replying to myself, I see I may have spoken a little too hastily:
http://www.netbsd.org/ports/#ports-by-cpu [netbsd.org]
http://www.openbsd.org/armish.html [openbsd.org]
Re:This might be useful (Score:3, Informative)
Get a Z2. It will cost 50 bucks and give you a working laptop that fits in your hand.
Re:Google is part of your problem (Score:5, Informative)
Do you ever use www.google.com/linux or www.google.com/bsd ?
Linux on iPAQ (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This might be useful (Score:3, Informative)
Back in the day, the reason that the MobilePro 780 (and friends) had severe limitations running Linux/BSD was due to the design of the hardware. WinCE was installed into mask programmable ROMs. This meant that it was impossible to replace the code at the locations the processors vectored to when doing a reset. This meant that deep sleep was impossible.
These days, the OS is held in flash memory, and can be replaced more easily. Most of the systems I've played with it has been possible to replace things. One big issue, however, is that the WinCE boot loader has a different interface to the kernel hand-off than uboot or redboot. This can be replaced, but can be harder because of protected boot blocks.... I've not reflashed the latest
Re:This might be useful (Score:3, Informative)
Done
Re:This might be useful (Score:3, Informative)
See the wikipage [wikipedia.org]:
processor: xscale - 319 MHz
memory: 32 MB
Also has wifi.
And it can run Debian!
Re:This might be useful (Score:5, Informative)
I believe we were talking about Ubuntu Netbook Remix, not Ubuntu Big Honking Desktop Version. You could click on the link in the summary, google 'beagleboard,' or go to Youtube. That's what I did, took two minutes. I mean, here you are using the Internet, without really using the Internet.
Re:This might be useful (Score:5, Informative)
Debian is a possibility, but Ubuntu won't work. Ubuntu has been updated to a newer arm instruction set than the one used in a lot of these netbooks.
The problem with these things is, unlike x86, ARM has no BIOS. Your kernel/image has to be customized to work with all the chips that particular netbook has. This would be easier if they all had the same CPUs/SoCs, but they all vary quite a bit.
I've seen vt8500 netbooks, wm8505's, Samsung SC2410's, 7802's, cheap x86-i386 knockoffs, and MIPS based netbooks. None use the same boot loaders (!), and few have the same instruction sets. (!) Those that do do not have the same LCD controllers or other components, and usually all drivers are closed source. (if available at all)
There are some attempts to get linux on them... here's a few:
http://s0.blackmage.co.uk/~nextvolume/via_arm/index.php [blackmage.co.uk] (some luck, using android kernels mostly)
http://3mx.taita.co.uk/ [taita.co.uk] (some luck)
http://mininetbooks.your-board.com/ [your-board.com] (no luck yet)
If you've got one and want to chat, join the IRC on freenode.net, channel #easypc
Most of the hackers and developers there have different kinds of netbooks, and only one each, but pooling knowledge has been handy. Apparently vt8500/wm8505 netbooks usually have a read-only card reader that needs to be soldered to be fixed. My Anyka 7802 netbook ($58 shipped!) doesn't have this problem, but it has no drivers available. Not even Android runs on it.
There's a dozen or so people in the channel, so if you've got questions (or maybe answers), join in. Note: We're all in different timezones. Responses can take hours, or if you're lucky minutes.
Bootload is the issue (Score:3, Informative)
A number of posts are mentioning MeeGo (Score:3, Informative)
So here's a little more background for those who haven't followed development of it closely:
MeeGo is the arranged marriage of Intel's Moblin + Nokia's Maemo.
MeeGo is still under heavy development, and although source and builds are available, everything is still experimental.
The steering group is "planning [a] release of MeeGo version 1 in the second quarter of 2010", according to the FAQ [meego.com]. It'll be here soon; don't start making plans to run it as your daily OS until v1.0 is actually released.
To give a taste of how raw development of the OS is right now, even basic tutorials on how to write a "Hello, World" application aren't useful to the community yet [meego.com] as most tutorials depend upon the MeeGo SDK, a component that hasn't yet been released by Intel.
But what you care about most is: "Will it run on my hardware?"
The best place to determine that is on the Devices [meego.com] page on the MeeGo Wiki. If you find that you can run the current development images on a different piece of hardware, please make a note of it on that page.
Re:Amazing! (Score:4, Informative)
I haven't tried with 128MB, but Etch + E17 runs dandy on a Pentium 2 with 192MB of RAM.