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updates released by Ubuntu until today have been applied so there should be very little in terms of packages that are out of date.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.

Maverick Installer, Linux kernel (2.6.31.14.12, December 2010)

The updated Maverick installer and "rescue image" is now online on PowerDeveloper. This includes a kernel update including a cleaned up HDMI driver, several bugfixes for Smartbook and Smarttop, and a cleaned up and updated Maverick root filesystem, along with a unified firmware updater for all systems.

Firmware Update

U-Boot 2.0.6 includes support for booting both systems under the same autoscripting system that other ARM boards (Marvell Dove, Beagleboard) utilize - on boot, the firmware will scan SD card and PATA for the first partition of format VFAT (MSDOS) or ext2/3 (Linux) and try and load a file called "boot.scr". This is all U-Boot does in the latest version. This is a departure from the system used on shipping TO2 and TO3 Efika MX Smarttop systems which would simply scan SD then PATA for "uImage" and blindly load it with built-in kernel boot arguments. The net benefit is that you gain support for

• Setting boot arguments for the kernel in an editable file on disk (SD or PATA)
• Using Initrd ramdisks (essential for current Ubuntu installations, enabling more modular kernel images)
  
• Doing any pre-boot scripting you need to perform before the kernel loads

However, blindly updating U-Boot on a TO2 or TO3 Efika MX Smarttop will instantly produce a non-booting system unless boot.scr is placed on the system to continue the boot process. It is therefore shipped as part of the Maverick installer. We recommend everyone simply update to Maverick. We will entertain individual support and extra-special requirements as needed, where trashing your existing Smarttop or Smartbook is not an option, but we really do recommend starting from scratch as there are a lot of things to fix and change and if you miss one.. the result will not be pretty.

Kernel Update (2.6.31.14.12 - efikasb-10.08.00 branch)

• Operates on ALL Efika MX models (TO2, TO3, Smartbook)

Includes updates to GPU kernel module, many fixes to platform support for TO2 boards, Smartbook improvements such as USB suspend issue being fixed, and also the "vertical offset" display bug fixed. The packages include a modular kernel without MMC, PATA or USB support compiled in - these are modules and it is expected by the behavior of Ubuntu that these are loaded from the initial ramdisk generated upon installation.

NOTE: If you install this kernel on an older Maverick system PLEASE add the modules "pata_fsl", "ehci_hcd", "mx_sdhci", "mmc_block" to the /etc/initramfs-tools/modules file in order for them to be forcibly added to the initial ramdisk on installation.


Maverick System Update

• Operates on ALL Efika MX models (TO2, TO3, Smartbook)

The desktop image has been updated to GNOME rather than Xfce since it is more stable and user friendly. The installed system image is not substantially bigger on disk, and includes OpenOffice. All updates to the end of November 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.

NOTE: please do not select "Encrypt my Home folder" - something is not operating correctly in the setup of ecryptfs, and the result is that it will give you a basically broken system. We realise the importance of a secure environment especially for workplaces where access to VPNs or corporate networks is only authorized with encryption enabled, and we are working on a solution.


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.

If you have problems seeing the Progress of the installation (HDMI or DVI monitor not working correctly), we would much appreciate the details of your monitor. We have tested on several (upwards of 10) HDMI and DVI monitors and HDTV units with successful results, however there are reports of other monitors not working ideally. This is under investigation. If you had any problems with your monitor in the past, you may want to check on IRC or on the forums before installing a Smarttop and potentially getting no display..

Maverick, Smarttop/Smartbook kernels

All Efika MX Smarttop and MX Smartbooks are now shipping with a pre-release Ubuntu Maverick with Xfce. Source filesystems are available on PowerDeveloper.

Also shipping today: the Smartbook kernel (-efikasb, also a pre-release) and an update to the Smarttop kernel (-efikamx) built from the same point in the git tree. This is in another branch - efikasb-10.07.11.

These kernels match the Maverick support. In this sense installing them on top of Karmic systems is a bad idea. It will produce an unbootable system unless you find a way to not have udev and upstart mount their own /dev and subordinate filesystems. We will make an update in a little while that fixes this for older Linux distributions.

Known issues so far:

• on Smarttop some DVI monitors again don't work. We are still investigating solutions which work on ALL systems
• on Smartbook there is a ~5 pixel blank at the end of the panel and the entire display is shifted up slightly
  
• Default kernel ships with devtmpfs enabled which means any systems before Ubuntu Lucid (i.e. all previously shipping with Karmic) are recommended NOT to update. We are investigating a solution to make Karmic work with it, and a kernel update for the meantime
  
• Smartbook battery driver occasionally doesn't report "current_avg" properly
• Smartbook lid close event automatically suspends the system, but when it comes back all USB devices are dead. Possibly needs a udev script to handle this.
  
• No flash-kernel package support for EfikaMX in Maverick yet so no initramfs created automatically.
• 2010-09-28 TO2 boards still have SD card detection problems (steev from Gentoo is looking into this last time I checked).
  

So, if you're not going to be running Maverick, the kernel you have (2.6.31-008 or 2.6.31.14 previous release) will work fine for you. Don't update with the standard kernel, get the "nodevtmpfs" version if you're using Karmic.

Major and minor fixes depending on how you look at it:

• Several bugs with with the internal variable "pixclk_limit" have been fixed whereby a user with a 1280x720@60 mode set would find that it would corrupt the display after a few blanks or a few hours of runtime. This manifested itself either as garbage on the display for the bottom 3rd of the monitor, or a lockup, or both.
• The kernel now supports a real 32-bit display mode but needs a recompile to activate it. The Smartbook only has a 16-bit display controller so it is probably better to run in 16-bit and let the OS dither and manage the display, as 32-bit direct mode will cause significant banding.
  
• block IO scheduler now defaults to "noop" since having CFQ was soaking CPU cycles without giving any benefit (scheduling block IO to take advantage of "closer" blocks is meaningless on an SSD).
• ramzswap is back in lieu of being able to include zram.
• oprofile is enabled in the default configuration. You need to manually load the module before you run oprofile.
• faster kernel memcpy and kernel preemption enabled
  
• Several ARM kernel fixes due for 2.6.35 and 2.6.36 backported
• RT2870 driver is less chatty (no dmesg lines full of empty #)
• CRC32 performance optimization meant for 2.6.35 backported

The Maverick filesystems are current as of the freeze implemented before the Maverick beta 2. You can find them at Linux Support. The Kernels are available at Kernel Support.

UPDATE 2010-09-27: to boot the Smartbook from SD card you need to make a "boot.scr" by making a small text file (the simplest can be "run bootcmd_sdhc") and running a command line as so:

mkimage -A arm -O linux -a 0 -e 0 -T script -C none -n "Boot SDHC" -d myscript.txt boot.scr

A U-Boot unification for both platforms that relies on boot.scr for everything (thus letting you have full control over everything from the Linux side, and preconfigured scripts) is coming soon. If anyone has any ideas for preconfigured, board-specific environment variables (such as console="ttymxc0,115200" or so) that can be appended to bootargs or make scripting easier, we are all ears :)

UPDATE 2010-09-28: The Xfce Maverick is mislabeled "maverick-final" - it is not the final Maverick (not released for another 2 weeks..) nor our final update on the matter. However it is the final version for currently shipping products and will be on every new unit. I hope that clarifies it.