Maverick Installer, Linux kernel (2.6.31.14.20, February 2011)

The updated Maverick installer and "rescue image" is now online on PowerDeveloper.

Firmware Update

The firmware update has been moved to a seperate card for ease of use and to work around VFAT bugs in U-Boot. See the previous blog post for details on the changes.

Kernel Update (2.6.31.14.20 - master branch)

• Operates on ALL Efika MX models (TO2, TO3, Smartbook)
• See previous blog posts for details..

Maverick System Update

• Operates on ALL Efika MX models (TO2, TO3, Smartbook)
• Installer:
  • Asks before installing and can drop back to a terminal for "rescue card" operation
  • Creates a dedicated swap partition instead of a swap file. It's configured to be 576MB at the end of the SSD.
• OEM Configuration:
• Encrypted home directories (and encrypted swap) now work
• No longer requires a password for the "oem" user keyring connecting to wireless
• Generally better performance due to kernel updates
• Accelerated 2D and 3D drivers installed
• Rollback to Ubuntu mainline versions of some packages

All updates released by Ubuntu until today have been applied so there should be very little in terms of packages that are out of date. All systems (Smarttop TO2, TO3 and Smartbook) will boot into the installer, copy in the image to the PATA disk, reboot and ask for Language, Timezone, Keyboard settings, Username, Password, Machine Name and suchlike. This will replace the old "oem" user with one of your choice.

You may need to add yourself to the "Audio" and "Video" groups to enable sound and webcam access. You can do this as you log in to the system for the first time through the Users and Groups control panel item.


Okay, I got the maverick-installer.img.xz file, how do I install it to my system?

Simply extract the archive (WinZip, 7-Zip, or command line at your option) and use your favorite utility here to copy it to a 2GB SD card. The utilities recommended are "dd" (or dcfldd), "flashnul" on Windows, or on an existing Ubuntu installation the Ubuntu USB Image Writer (you can find a list of imaging utilities here).

As an example with "dd", you can do the following:

xz -dc maverick-installer.img.xz | dd of=/dev/mmcblk0

Once you have this image on an SD card simply power off your system and insert the SD card. Power it back on and the system will install automatically and when complete, shut down automatically. You may then remove the SD card and boot into the installed system. It really is that simple.


I don't want to trash my system, can I just get the packages?

Yes, there is a package repository going up right now, wait for a blog post later today.