Gnewsense on Gdium

[Frederic Muller]

Dear all,

Someone in Italy is asking about Gnewsense experience on Gdium. The
GnewsensetoMIPS project can be found here:
http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Projects/GNewSenseToMIPS and I'd be curious to
know whether anyone has tried yet and/if anyone could try and report back?

Thanks a lot.

Fred
OLPH program

[s.bou...@free.fr]

Hi Frederic,

I forwarded your message to the gnewsense-dev mailing list.

Kind regards

Samy

Selon Frederic Muller <frederi...@dexxon.cn>:

[Philippe Vachon]

Hi Fred, list:

I've actually managed to hack Gnewsense onto the Gdium. It still
requires a bit of footwork (it's on par with the amount of work needed
to get Debian running on a Gdium) but it's doable. Unfortunately, I
don't think I'll be able to get the Debian-Installer image I've been
working on "upstream" because of the Wireless card requiring non-free
firmware (*glaring at RaLink*). That said, anyone willing to take an
hour or so to replace their RaLink card with a more free Atheros 5k or
9k card might be able to use a de-blobbed image, I suppose!

In general, however, the user experience is the same as Debian or
Ubuntu. The issues that cropped up were the SiliconMotion driver in
Xorg, but fbdev works fine for the time being. I rebuilt Xorg against
a more modern upstream version to get the SM502 (and SM712 on the
Yeeloong) working, but I suppose most people won't want to do that!

Cheers,
Phil

[Daniel Clark]

>> Someone in Italy is asking about Gnewsense experience on Gdium. The
>> GnewsensetoMIPS project can be found here:
>> http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Projects/GNewSenseToMIPS and I'd be curious to
>> know whether anyone has tried yet and/if anyone could try and report back?

I don't have personal knowledge of gNewSense running on the gdium, but
since gNewSense doesn't support nonfree wifi the default gdium wifi
would not work.

It is possible to replace the nonfree wifi on the gdium, but it's a bit
of a procedure; philv has an excellent step-by-step blog post on how to
do that, but I can't seem to be able to find it at the moment.

--
Daniel JB Clark | Sys Admin, Free Software Foundation
pobox.com/~dclark | http://www.fsf.org/about/staff#danny

[Philippe Vachon]

Hi Daniel,

On 2009-09-22, at 10:09 AM, Daniel Clark wrote:

*snip!*

>
> It is possible to replace the nonfree wifi on the gdium, but it's a
> bit
> of a procedure; philv has an excellent step-by-step blog post on how
> to
> do that, but I can't seem to be able to find it at the moment.
>

http://olph.gdium.com/wiki/doku.php/howto:takeapart is the culprit.
Complete with photos, even, for those who prefer to not read the
mountain of text there.

For the adventurous, there's a tutorial on installing a UART I wrote
as well: http://olph.gdium.com/wiki/doku.php/howto:uart

Not for those with weak stomachs.

Cheers,
Phil