Ben NanoNote Plans and a Question on U-Boot Ext 3 & 4 Support

Elena ``of Valhalla'' elena.valhalla at gmail.com
Sun Aug 12 03:42:13 EDT 2012


On 2012-08-11 at 17:00:29 -0700, Riley Paxton wrote:
> Thank you for responding to my E-Mail. I appreciate it. I have to
> admit that I do have limited knowledge on the current limitations of
> U-Boot. I am glad to find out another Debian user who also (hopefully)
> has a NanoNote. Is that why you've subscribed to this mailing list?

Another debian sort-of-user here: my nanonote came with jlime, which 
works well, but AFAIK isn't actively developed anymore, and 
I'm looking into debian to see if I can reproduce its (X11-based) 
environment, and be able to install some other software.

> The whole process took longer than several minutes, so I'm not sure if
> I want to try reproducing it again (but I'll try it again anyway, so,
> whatever).

debootstrapping on SD is always going to take its time, some things 
that may (or may not) help include the following.

* Using an apt cache: I use approx, it was trivial to install 
  and configure and it is useful if you have other debian 
  devices around. OTOH, if the ben is your only mips device 
  and you're not debootstrapping often it is not going to 
  be very useful.
* debootstrap on an hard disk, then copy on SD card: 
  this is expecially useful if you fear that second stage may 
  go wrong, because some of the work has already been done.
  Even if you don't keep it on the hard disk, it should save 
  some time, since che download + unpacking is done on a faster 
  device, and stuff is only copied to the slower one once.

> I have a Sansa Clip Zip, and the Rockbox crew recommends that I keep
> the original firmware or else I'd have to tear the thing apart and use
> JTAG flashing. Blasphemy! If only it was as easy to screw up the
> software and flash again like the NanoNote. This might sound silly,
> but the Ben (or the future one) might also be a prime platform for
> Rockbox. What do you think? Haha!

Well, one of the things I use my nanonote for is as a music player: 
rockbox on the ben is probably a good fit for rockbox, 
even if you do miss a bit of the general-purposeness of the ben.

I can see an use for a bootable uSD with rockbox and space for 
your music, if it is very fast to boot :)
 

-- 
Elena ``of Valhalla''




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