The Ångström Distribution

Hi,

If you want to help out your machine mentors by testing kernel 2.6.23 for poodle, grab a 2007.12-r9 image from the poodle autobuild area, install it and tell us all about it.

Zaurus users should download the 'installkit' tarballs and will find the updater.sh, zImage.bin and rootfs file ready for flashing inside.

Known issues:
- The opie images are using task-base instead of task-base-extended, so wifi tools and some of the crypto modules for wpa are missing.

happy testing,

If you want to help out your machine mentors by testing kernel 2.6.24 for akita, c7x0, simpad, spitz or tosa, grab a 2007.12-r9 image from the autobuild area, install it and tell us all about it.

Zaurus users should download the 'installkit' tarballs and will find the updater.sh, zImage.bin and rootfs file ready for flashing inside, the simpad users will need the jffs2 file and flash it according to the instructions on opensimpad.org.

happy testing!

We now have a few test kernels available for the following machines:

• h2200
• h3900
• h5000
• hx4700

Booting these kernels will present you with an on-screen menu that allows you to select various boot options (CF, SD, Flash, NFS) using the joypad on your PDA. If you wanted an easy way to boot from a non-standard location, here's your chance!

See the mailinglist archives for some background info.

You can now get the angstrom 2007.12 release images for Sharp Zaurus SL-C7x0, SL-C8x0 machines machines from: http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/releases/2007.12/images/c7x0/
The following images are available: You can install those using the c7x0, c8x0 install instructions.
After installation and network setup, be sure to do 'ipkg update ; ipkg upgrade' to get future bugfixes and security updates.

You can get the angstrom 2007.12 release images for for Sharp Zaurus SL-C1000 'akita' machines from:

http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/releases/2007.12/images/akita

After installation and network setup, be sure to do 'ipkg update ; ipkg upgrade' to get future bugfixes and security updates.

You can get the angstrom 2007.12 release image for console-, minimalist-gpe- and x11-image for Siemens SIMpad machines from:

http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/releases/2007.12/images/simpad/

If you own a 16 MB class SIMpad (CL4,WP50 or T-SinusPad) please use the console- or minimalist-gpe-image and install only the packages you need. The x11-image is too big for those machines. For 32 MB class machines I suggest using the x11-image.

-- Bernhard

Angstrom 2007.12 images for iPaqs h2200, h3900, h4000, hx4700
were uploaded to the release location,
http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/releases/2007.12/images/ . h5000
is expected to follow shortly after testing. For each device, following
images provided:

1. Novice and intermediate users:
* x11-image LiveRamdisk
* bootmanager and x11-image ext2 image
How to use/installs these is described at
http://linuxtogo.org/gowiki/WinCeQuickInstall

2. Advanced users:
* base-image
* console-image
* minimal-gpe-image
* x11-image
What are those are described in Angstrom manual,
http://linuxtogo.org/gowiki/AngstromManual .

Known issues with PocketPC/WM devices support in 2007 release:
http://bugs.openembedded.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1585

Known issues in Angstrom 2007 release (not machine-specific):
http://bugs.openembedded.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1573

Bugs should be reported at http://bugs.openembedded.org .

I would like to thank all testers of iPaq images, especially Joshua Layne and Milan Plzik who joined to be the release testers for h2200 and h5000, and hopefully will be interested to become mentors for these devices.

For the future work, as a comaintainer of PocketPC/linux-handhelds-2.6 devices in OE, as time permits, I plan to prepare unsupported images for all devices supported by linux-handhelds-2.6, and ping known kernel maintainers to join with testing/mentorship for Angstrom. Any help with that is much
appreciated.

-- Paul S.

You can get the angstrom 2007.12 release image for console-image for Efika machines from:

http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/releases/2007.12/images/efika/

* console-image is a pretty full-featured command-line image, with more
networking (e.g. bluetooth and wifi connected to the usb ports) options
installed. It also allows access to the feeds to install more applications.

After installation and network setup, be sure to do 'ipkg update ; ipkg
upgrade' to get future bugfixes and security updates.

-- Koen

You can now get the angstrom 2007.12 release images for base-image and
nas-server-image for ixp4xx machines from:

http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/releases/2007.12/images/ixp4xxle/

and:

http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/releases/2007.12/images/ixp4xxbe/

(little-endian and big-endian respectively).

* base-image is a fairly bare-bones image that will allow you to format
disks and external media and install additional applications from the
feeds. There are also nslu2 specific binary 8MB images which can be
directly uploaded to a standard NSLU2 with upslug2. If you have
upgraded the internal flash in your NSLU2 to 16MB, there are specific
images for that as well.

* nas-server-image is the beginnings of a full-featured server image,
designed to support most things that you would expect from a network
attached storage device. It also allows access to the feeds to install
more applications. It is too big for an NSLU2 - it's intended for
ixp4xx devices with internal hard disks, like the NAS100d, DSMG-600 or
FSG-3.

The set of boards supported by the ixp4xx kernel includes the Linksys
NSLU2 (tested), Gateworks Avila Network Platform (untested), Giant
Shoulder Inc Loft (untested), Intel IXDP425 (untested), Intel IXDPG425
(untested), Intel IXCDP1100 (untested), Iomega NAS 100d (tested), D-Link
DSMG-600 RevA (tested), and the Freecom FSG-3 (tested). Note that the
ixp4xx kernel expects you to have a sane bootloader that presents the
officially registered machine id and correct ATAGs for your board. The
Apex second-stage bootloader is included in the nslu2 specific binary
8MB images for this very reason. Apex also supports the nas100d,
dsmg600 and fsg, and binaries for these boards can be built using the
nslu2-linux kernel subversion repository.

After installation and network setup, be sure to do 'ipkg update ; ipkg
upgrade' to get future bugfixes and security updates.

-- Rod

You can get the angstrom 2007.12 release images for base-image and console-image for ep93xx machines from:

http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/releases/2007.12/images/ep93xx/

* base-image is a fairly bare-bones image that will allow you to format
disks and external media and install stuff from the feeds

* console-image is a pretty full-featured command-line image, with more
networking (e.g. bluetooth and wifi connected to the usb ports) options
installed. It also allows access to the feeds to install more applications.

If your board has an old (or faulty) redboot that passes the wrong board
id to R1 you can do something like:

load -v -r -b 0x600000 -m http -h 172.20.3.1 /koen/ep93xx/zImage
mfill -b 0x600000 -l 4 -p 0xe3a01c03
mfill -b 0x600004 -l 4 -p 0xe38110be
exec

To fix that. In the future we should consider using 'arm-kernel-shim'
for that.

After installation and network setup, be sure to do 'ipkg update ; ipkg
upgrade' to get future bugfixes and security updates.

-- Koen

If you are a machine mentor, or want to be one, send you ssh-dsa public key, along with your real name and location to [email protected] and the coreteam will take care of them. A bounce message is expected, the mailinglist admin will approve your post.

Tim Chick is now machine-mentor for Akita, so it now is supported again.

Just so there is no confusion for people switching from from OpenZaurus there are currently only three Zaurus machines that have active support within Ångström.

These machines are supported: c7x0, spitz (C3X00), poodle (5600).

These machines are not supported: tosa (6000), collie (5500), akita (1000).

We will continue to produce images for the unsupported machines but fixes to them are likely to be slow in being worked on without active developer working on them.

The c7x- family install instructions have been updated.

The gmane version of our mailinglists can now be read at

gmane.linux.distributions.angstrom.devel
gmane.linux.distributions.angstrom.user

Thanks to Jamie Lenehan we have a PDF version of the OE usermanual. It contains all kind of usefull information for people wanting to build or work on Ångström. For easy reference, the HTML version is online as well.

After numerous requests, the link to the download location for images, packages and more:

http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/unstable/

Thanks to our developers our feeds are starting to get nicely populated:

Updating Ångström unstable base: 3716 packages
Updating Ångström unstable perl: 1710 packages
Updating Ångström unstable python: 101 packages
Updating Ångström unstable debug: 606 packages
Updating Ångström unstable gstreamer: 169 packages
Updating Ångström unstable Motorola A780: 241 packages
Updating Ångström unstable iPAQ h2200: 250 packages
Updating Ångström unstable iPAQ h4000: 59 packages
Updating Ångström unstable HTC universal/ iMate jasjar: 23 packages
Updating Ångström unstable iPAQ hx4700: 241 packages
Updating Ångström unstable Psion Teklogix NetBook Pro: 94 packages
Updating Ångström unstable Nokia 770 internet tablet: 12 packages
Updating Ångström unstable Sharp Zaurus 5600 (Poodle): 294 packages
Updating Ångström unstable Sharp Zaurus c7x0 (Corgi, Boxer, Husky, Shepher): 308 packages
Updating Ångström unstable Sharp Zaurus SL-C1000 (akita): 283 packages
Updating Ångström unstable iPAQ h5xxx: 211 packages
Updating Ångström unstable Sharp Zaurus SL-C6000 (Tosa): 296 packages
Updating Ångström unstable Sharp Zaurus SL-C3xxx (Spitz, Borzoi, Terrier): 283 packages
Added 8897 packages in 0 days, 0 hours, 4 minutes and 16 seconds 

If you are curious what is actually in the feeds, check out our feed browser

Lennard Poetering mentions in his blog about avahi: All major (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, OpenSUSE) and many minor distributions have it. A quick Google-based poll I did a few weeks ago shows that it is part of at least 19 different distributions, including a range of embedded ones. So check out Ångström in the Avahi wiki :)

The mailinglists have been moved, you can subscribe by following the instructions of the following pages:

• Developer list
• User list

You can find links to the archives on those pages as well.

Thanks to the testing people have done with the images and feeds we now have a fairly large collection of software available for Ångström. To make it easier to see what's available we've implemented a small frontend: repo.php, and its source.

We are looking for volunteers to add search capabilities, package upload and gpg signing features and ofcourse bugfixes and optimizations.
Suggestions for an appropriate license are also welcome :)

You can find a new batch of images at the usual location. Fixes include a working mount, better mount blacklists for udev, pcmciautils included, updated the xserver to the latest git and a newer kernel for the ipaqs.

After some help from X-man mallum the crashes have stopped, and we're approaching nice level of stability. Help us squash the remaining bugs by testing the images and report bugs! -> images <- UPDATE: tosa, akita and c7x0 are rigged to boot from SD instead of flash, sorry for the confusion.

We have some new images available. There shouldn't be any segfaults anymore, but access to a serial console and/or a real keyboard is recommended.

UPDATE: get the images here. Spitz and Akita are missing since 2.6.17 doesn't compile for them.

Mickey has published a brand new newsletter!

The updates to drupal 4.7.0 went without any errors, but please let us know if you spot errors in the site.

I've put some images online for people to test

It is important to discover and log problems as soon as possible so wecan make a plan for solving them. These images will have many problems and aren't suitable for daily use. Their sole purpose is to find problems. Till we decide on which bugtracker to use (the OE one, setup our own, etc) I'd suggest using the mailinglist.

Have fun with the images!

UPDATE: A build for Tosa machines is in progress

We are going through the .dev branch fixing build errors like crazy to get some images out for testing this weekend. This will mean we can see how many problems our brand spanking new EABI toolchain is causing.

Stay tuned!

We have a website now!