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Old 08-18-2013, 01:57 PM   #16
Ken Maltby
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I just downloaded it and it is almost 8GB. It took me ~35min. to write it onto a 16GB card.

The partitions look a little odd, compared to the Kobo ones. I am wondering what the "Linux Swap" partition is? It is too small to be a recovery partition for this. The MiniTool Partition Wizard lists that partition's File System as "Linux Swap" not Ext#. It is probably a Linux thing, I guess.

The "rootfs" is only 41% used, and there is a FAT32 "KOBOeReader" partition, This makes me wonder how I should use the "unallocated" space I have on this 16GB card? I could add a little to both, I guess.

Oh well, I guess I should see if it works in my AuraHD at all, first.

Well it doesn't work on my AuraHD with out any modification. It just starts with ~55% of the screen changed on the right side, it looks like a lot of empty horizontal lines.

Luck;
Ken

Last edited by Ken Maltby; 08-18-2013 at 02:33 PM.
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Old 08-18-2013, 02:05 PM   #17
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Linux swap on PCs is used when you run out of RAM. Not exactly, but you see the idea.

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Old 08-18-2013, 02:54 PM   #18
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I tried the image on my Glo, and it does work (mostly). It still thinks it has an 800x600 resolution, so not all the screen is used and the touch calibration is off a bit, but it starts up fine. Very nice work, Marek! Are you planning on releasing your kernel changes?

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it seems really great

is it possible to have a version with only minimal debian installation with no apps no games no develop?!? thanks

8gb is the minimum sd card needed?!? just because i have to to buy a new one
Ah- posted a minimal debian chroot a while back. It's not modified to work well with only touch input, however.

Last edited by KevinShort; 08-19-2013 at 09:06 AM.
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Old 08-19-2013, 01:58 PM   #19
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is it possible to have a version with only minimal debian installation with no apps no games no develop?!? thanks
Of course. Debian is installed in chroot enviroment. It means that whole system is under "debian" folder on SD card. You can create as many subsystems (chroot folders) as you want. You may install ubuntu side by side with Deabian. You can choose which packets you need - or you can just remove unwanted packets from my demo image with apt-get command. It's a real distribution That's a beauty of it.

I chose Debian because it's the only decent distrubution that supports armel architecture and I needed armel architecture to run mono 3.2.1 (also java runtime is compiled for armel too).

Newest ubuntu is compiled for armhf (that means faster float operations). But mono packet is unusable there - there is unsucessful hack for armhf - if you ask it for 2^10 it answers 0.078 Armhf is great if you want faster audio and video processing - but I think that's doesn't matter on Kobo at all.

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8gb is the minimum sd card needed?!? just because i have to to buy a new one
Yes, because the image is 8GB large. You can buy larger one (and resize partitions with gparted on linux or leave it as it is and resign from additional space). The image has 3GB free space on system partition and 2GB free space on user partition (only 3GB are used).

It is a sample installation. Like your system on your on PC - it's an individual thing and everyone may want to use different sizes and packets.

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The partitions look a little odd, compared to the Kobo ones.
Yes. They are. I deleted recovery partition. It had no sense for me to keep it. And I added swap partition for virtual memory. Kobo has only 256 MB of RAM. That's not very much. Is it true that Aura HD has 1GB of RAM??

As a side effect I've changed system drive partition from mmcblk0p3 to mmcblk0p2 to have swap partition at the end of SD card. Maybe it was wrong decision, because I had to replace all references to mmcblk0p3 to mmcblk0p2 (also in nickel.so.1.0.0 with hex editor). So if you want to customize your image, maybe it's better to repartition it that way that system partition is still mmcblk0p3 and swap file is mmcblk0p2 (and not vice-versa). It will be easier to upgrade kobo software later. Now there is firmware 2.5.2 installed.

The startup menu uses python for Kobo 2.5.2 from Kevin, so that's another thing that's need to be ugraded if you want to upgrade kobo software to 2.8.1 (or you can change startup menu to the one from tshering for example. That's why I love this forum - things from different people can work together. The replace of mmcblk0p3 -> mmcblk0p2 or repartitioning is needed, too of course.

Quote:
I tried the image on my Glo, and it does work (mostly). It still thinks it has an 800x600 resolution, so not all the screen is used and the touch calibration is off a bit, but it starts up fine. Very nice work, Marek!
Kevin! That's really great news! Of course everything can be tweaked. My x11 touch driver is one big hack. Probably I hardcoded resolution somewhere .

So maybe it's working with Mini, too - it has 800x600 resolution.

I was excited that the chip inside Kobos supports two fingers at the same time but after making changes in the kernel I was also disappointed that I cannot find/configure any existing multitouch driver for X11 that has a) mouse emulation - movement and left click b) right click simulation c) gestures, so I started hacking my own and I implemented only a). But it's great that in the future the gestures may be supported (I can't wait for pinch zooming). Changes in kernel are done. We still need more expanded X11 driver for that.

Quote:
Are you planning on releasing your kernel changes?
Yes. I will upload it on git-hub Maybe in the weekend.

There are a few things that may be improved later - like adding rules for automatic fullscreen refresh or adapting changes to support all devices (maybe changes in touch code for GLO are needed?).

Hm.. Kevin - is touch working accurately when you boot to original kobo software from start-menu? If yes, the problem is not in the kernel but in my hacky x11 touch driver. If not, the problem is in the kernel.
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Old 08-19-2013, 02:10 PM   #20
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> This makes me wonder how I should use the "unallocated" space I have on this 16GB card? I could add a little to both, I guess.

Ken, you can write image to SD card and then resize KoboReader partition with resizing tool that supports Linux partitions (gparted for Linux or MiniTool Partition for Windows). Please take a look at this excellent post:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=209122
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Old 08-19-2013, 02:17 PM   #21
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But Ken, I think it will not work correctly with Aura HD, yet (if it will boot at all). According to what Kevin tested in the best case you will have at least problems with screen resolution. Someone is needed to adapt it to Aura after I publish source codes.
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Old 08-19-2013, 03:23 PM   #22
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So you're a OpenInkpot developer! WoW! Nice to meet you You must know many useful tricks! I need to become familiar with this project.
Nice to meet you too.

Well, OpenInkpot is kind of dead right now, but I'd like to continue developing free software for the ebook readers. I was working on moving OpenInkpot to the OpenEmbedded, but debian is a nice choice too.
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Old 08-19-2013, 03:59 PM   #23
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Hm.. Kevin - is touch working accurately when you boot to original kobo software from start-menu? If yes, the problem is not in the kernel but in my hacky x11 touch driver. If not, the problem is in the kernel.
I only booted to the kobo software once just to see if it worked, and I didn't try to set it up, but I'm pretty sure that the touch coordinates were still off. The startup boot selection screen also was not accurate. I had to touch where the icons would be if the whole display was used, even though it only used about 3/4 of the screen.
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Old 08-19-2013, 07:22 PM   #24
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Anyone else tried it on a Mini? I just did but after replacing the SD card with Marek's image it just flashed the LED green with a blank screen. Which appears to mean it couldn't boot.
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Old 08-19-2013, 07:39 PM   #25
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OK. So something weird happened with writing to the card - which is a Sandisk class4 8Gb. I dd'd the image file to it but I hadn't noticed that very near the end it gave a "no space left on device error".

I think I've got a 16Gb card that I can try it with tomorrow.
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Old 08-20-2013, 04:51 AM   #26
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I tried with the 16Gb card and no luck. Actually I'd managed to re-size the swap partition on the 8Gb card and that didn't help so using the 16Gb was a bit of a long shot.

I do think it's doing something. After the initial flash of the LED - green, then blue, then green again - there's a refresh of the eink screen (flashes black) and then nothing.
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Old 08-20-2013, 08:59 AM   #27
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i had try to write the img on a dane-elec 8gb class4 and
Win32DiskImager answer
not enough space on disk: 15652864 sectors , availabale: 15523840 sectors
possible to resize before writing ?
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Old 08-24-2013, 05:12 AM   #28
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Hi!

I've managed to run the image in my Mini by changing the u-boot bootloader and some hardware information in the first sectors of the image itself (it's taken from a Touch, so it contains information about Touch's hardware that's different from the Mini's one)

Everything work like a charm! The only thing I've noticed is when I boot in nickel and put the device on standy it power off with a blank screen and the serial console shows this message:

Code:
msp430_write: write reg error : Reg 0x90 = 0xff00
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Old 08-24-2013, 05:16 AM   #29
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I've managed to run the image in my Mini by changing the u-boot bootloader and some hardware information in the first sectors of the image itself (it's taken from a Touch, so it contains information about Touch's hardware that's different from the Mini's one)
Can you post more details of what you changed?
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Old 08-24-2013, 06:02 AM   #30
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Yes, here's a tutorial I've been working on!

WARNING! Always do backup copies. I don't assume any responsibility in case of lost data or device damage.

The original image is based on a dump of a Touch, so the first 9,5MB of data at the beginning of the sd card (the space that appears as unallocated data in every partition manager) contains the bootloader and hardware information for the Touch.
In order to make it work, some change are needed:

Material:
  • Linux image for the Kobo (download from the first post).
  • Internal sdcard image (or the sd itself) from the Kobo Mini (the 'clean' one, with Kobo firmware only).
  • u-boot binaries. Find them here https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=200772
  • Hex editor with disk or disk image access. I've used HxD for Windows. (on linux dd can be used as well)

First step: identify the right u-boot for the Mini

Kobo Mini model N705 should alway have PCB E50610 and RAMType K4X2G323PC. If you want to check, put the sd card without linux in the Mini and use this command in a telnet session:

Code:
ntx_hwconfig -s -p /dev/mmcblk0 PCB
ntx_hwconfig -s -p /dev/mmcblk0 RAMType
Open the u-boot-2009.08.tar.gz package and extract the file named u-boot_mddr_256-{PCB}-{RAMTYPE}.bin

Second step: Overwrite the u-boot compiled for the Touch with the one for the Mini.

Open the u-boot binary file with HxD (Extra->"Open disk image") and leave the sector size to 512.
Scroll to the beginning of Sector 2 (it means: skip the first two sector, or the first 1024 bytes), place the caret before the first byte of the sector and select from there to the end of file. The last sector should be the Sector 139.
Copy the selected data (Right click->Copy).

Now open the Linux image in the same way as before (use always 512 sector size).
Go to the beginning of Sector 2, place the caret before the first byte of the sector and paste with Right click->Paste (overwrite).

Save the changes.

Third step: Overwrite the hardware configuration information.

In the same way as in step 2, open the 'clean' kobo mini internal sdcard image.

Scroll to Sector 1024. You should be able to read "HW CONFIG" in the first bytes. Select the entire sector and copy it.

Now return (or reopen, if closed) to the Linux image file, scroll to sector 1024 and Paste the data in the same way as in Step 2.

Save again, and you're done!
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