Further linux mainline adventures on minix neo x5 mini

This is a follor on from the last post, and as before, is a bit of a braindump post.

So, basically, it’s working now. The mystery part was adding “rootwait” to the kernel command line, presumably because of the mmc controller not having finished finding the card before it tried to mount root. This was only the kernel command line in the _linux_ build, nothing to do with the rockchip parameters file at all.

I followed the directions at http://hwswbits.blogspot.com/2013/11/your-own-official-linux-distro-in-sd.html to make an SD card with just the linux RFS. I’m still working on a generally “simpler is better” process. No initramfs, modules built in, plain RFS on sdcard because nand doesn’t work in mainline linux.

So…

wget http://releases.linaro.org/14.08/ubuntu/trusty-images/server/linaro-trusty-server-20140821-681.tar.gz # or similar
sudo umount -l /dev/sdd
sudo mkfs.ext4 -F -L linuxroot /dev/sdd
sudo su - # to keep permissions
cd /run/media/karlp/linuxroot
tar -xf ~karlp/Downloads/linaro-trusty-server-20140821-681.tar.gz --strip 1
sync
# back to regular user

Then put the sdcard in the minix and power cycle, and yay, I finally have a semblance of a linux system booting up!

It’s not entirely complete, but it’s getting a lot further than before!

bootlog.sdcard

I still don’t have any of the following working yet…. so it’s still a ways to go

  • ethernet
  • wifi
  • usb

:)

Leave a Comment

NOTE - You can use these HTML tags and attributes:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>