Smartbook

De Mathux


Here is some information and links about the smartbook

Specification

General

 * Freescale [[1]] Cortex‐A8 processor @ 800MHz
 * 512MB RAM
 * 1024x600 LCD Display 16bpp
 * “Chiclet” Keyboard & Trackpad with integrated “mouse” buttons

Networking & Wireless

 * Bluetooth 2.1+EDR (Broadcom)
 * 802.11b/g/n Wireless (Ralink RT3070)
 * Optional 3G module (GSM SIM slot behind battery, module is country‐specific)
 * AGPS for location‐aware applications (Broadcom)
 * Wireless killswitch

Storage

 * 2x SDHC card slot (1x SDHC, 1x MicroSDHC behind battery)
 * 16GB PATA Solid‐State Disk

Expansion

 * 2x USB ports
 * 3‐cell battery (2200 mAh)
 * worldwide AC adapter
 * Phone jack for headset (audio in / out)
 * Built-in 1.3MP video camera
 * Built-in microphone
 * Built-in stereo speaker

Size

 * 276 x 181 x 21mm (with battery) / 10.87 x 7.13 x 0.83 inches

Weight

 * 930 grams / 2.05 lbs

System

 * Ubuntu 10.04 (10.10 is also supported http://blog.efikamx.info/2011/02/maverick-installer-linux-kernel.html )

Battery autonomy is around 6h and 5h when playing video

Information

Information could be found

 * Rom, Doc , Forum ... on powerdeveloper
 * Manuals
 * on the Blog 
 * on official IRC channel (server: irc.freenode.net chan: #efika)
 * on the Debian wiki (maintained by zumbi) as debian have also been ported to efika. This page got a lot of information about Uboot and the kernel
 * On the Gentoo wiki

Repository

[policy ] is to contribute mainline but they have there proper repositories

 * http://gitorious.org/efikamx (kernel+uboot)
 * https://github.com/genesi (drivers and userspace)
 * http://git.denx.de/?p=u-boot/u-boot-pxa.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/efikasb (mainline uboot for efika. maintained by Marex)

Package

Last distrib is Here

Genesi use launchpad for bug report

Repo is : deb http://packages.efikamx.info/ maverick main universe

This is a signed repository which could be add in /etc/apt/sources.list after adding the genesi key like [[2]]:

wget http://packages.efikamx.info/Repository.key
sudo apt-key add Repository.key
rm Repository.key


ARMhf

Info on the forum

Linaro

Linaro is a not-for-profit (NFP) engineering organization that works on Linux-based open source software and tools. It provides aligned engineering and investment in upstream open source projects, a six monthly release of tools and software and support to silicon companies in upstreaming their system-on-a-chip (SoC) support.

Linaro is also working on the efika but the support is not finished.

Tools form Linaro (such as kernel / toolchain )could be found here : https://launchpad.net/~linaro-maintainers

Open the smartbook (and boot from SD)

http://www.genesi-usa.com/support/smartbook/tutorial/keyboard

Here are some instructing found on IRC.

Don't use knife, use a needle or so ... might work

 - there are four small holes on the top of the keyboard
 - put a tiny screwdriver in them and slowly remove the keyboard (pull it towards you carefully)
 - also, when you manage to get the top side loose, be careful not to rip off the foilcable connecting the keyboard to the mobo
 - when you manage, you will find the switch part (four switches on a single part) ... invert what's on them
 - then you can boot from full-size SD card (NOT NEEDED ANYMORE ! use uboot update)


Switch are 1. mmc0 2. mmc1 3.pata 4. no_avaible

Uboot-update

Before doing that, you should really know what you are doing!

Moreover, Genesi team prefer that you do **not** touch your firmware as you can easily break your device

[00:25] <Neko> this is why we don't give out the u-boot source code
[00:25] <Neko> the SD card will *NEVER* load again on Smartbook
[00:25] <Neko> it has a "power off" command in it


[00:32] <Neko> the uImage on the card is specifically engineered to boot and flash the Smarttop, because this is the only file the old Smarttop U-Boot will load
[00:32] <Neko> the Smartbookk will load the boot.scr
[00:33] <Neko> once they are both flashed to new U-Boot they both load the boot.scr and therefore the uImage is ignored
[00:34] <Neko> okay, take the card
[00:34] <Neko> flash the original SD image over it
[00:34] <Neko> check if it has a space of 8MB or so before the first partition
[00:34] <Neko> if not, copy the files off
[00:34] <Neko> repartition it with 8MB offset
[00:34] <Neko> copy the files back on to a vfat partition
[00:35] <Neko> (it has to be >64MB)
[00:35] <Neko> then dd if=u-boot-2009.01-2.0.6-efikasb of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1024 skip=1 seek=1
[00:35] <Neko> pop the keyboard, reverse all dip switches
[00:35] <Neko> use the SD card to boot the firmware and hit the key to go into the prompt
[00:36] <Neko> you will find, by referencing the boot.scr on another machine, exactly how to load and flash the SB firmware
[00:36] <Neko> do it by hand
[00:36] <Neko> then, once you are done *wipe that damn SD card* and flip your DIP switches back when you are sure it has nothing but 0's on it :D

...

[01:26] <Neko> because the best way to get access to the u-boot file is from that vfat partition
[01:26] <Neko> your layout should be
[01:26] <Neko> MBR | 8MB free space | VFAT partition
[01:26] <Neko> the MBR is 512 bytes and the iMX boot ROM padding is 1024 bytes
[01:26] <Neko> seek=1 skip=1 will jump over the MBR and the padding in the U-Boot file, placing 160kb of data in that 8MB space
[01:27] <Neko> since the NOR is 8MB and U-Boot may expect that much space there.. it's safer to have that much space on the SD before the first partition
[01:27] <Neko> anyway you can read it with mmcinit; mmcprobe 1; fatload mmc 0:1 ${loadaddr} ubootsb.bin or whatever it is
[01:30] <Neko> hmm, checking boot switches..
[01:30] <Neko> 3 needs to be off
[01:31] <Neko> 2 needs to be off
[01:31] <Neko> 1 needs to be off
[01:31] <Neko> 4 needs to be on...
[01:31] <Neko> or off.. depending on chipselect for SD card slot
[01:32] <Neko> so (off off off [SD]) and (on on on off) as nor is active low
[01:32] <Neko> otherwise you are trying to boot from the PMIC :]
[01:33] <Neko> that's right from the schematic, it should work


[00:47] <Marex> zumbi_: you don't need that (JTAG) to test either mainline uboot or mainline kernel :)
[00:47] <zumbi_> Marex: well, at least i need to recover the functionality to boot from SD
[00:48] <Marex> zumbi_: just select the right switches :)
[00:48] <Marex> then write the mainline uboot with this command:
[00:48] <Marex> dd if=u-boot.imx of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1024 seek=1
[00:48] <Marex> to the card ... and boot :)

OOo4kid

By Ericb2

untar it, and after, cd en-US/ooo4kids1.2/program and launch it : ./soffice

http://ftp.educoo.org/home/OOo4Kids/Linux_ARM/smartbook_efika/en-US/

Drivers

2d,3d, xv acceleration all require binary blobs, there is a fbdev driver which is quite fast and free, but doesn't offer xv accel

Kernel

Neko and steev and rtp do lots of kernel work

Some information about the last kernel could be found on the forum

more informations here

Memory Usage

The free command rapport "only" 400mo of Ram on 512, why ?

In actual fact what we reserve is 32MB for the IPU (which is the thing that handles the display) and 32MB for *both* GPUs. We are looking at revising these values, but it will stay around ~64MB.

2D/3D

http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1944

Gentoo

Steev did some doc about installing Gentoo on the MX

Steev's page

Fedora

There's a Fedora image at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/F18/Remixes/Genesi_Smartbook?rd=Architectures/ARM/Genesi_Smartbook with a recent kernel release and uses Barebox http://wiki.barebox.org/doku.php?id=boards:efikasb

Arm hardfp

Check with zumbi and Markos easy to test: debootstrap --foreign --arch=armhf http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian/


Change SSD

http://www.getpartsonline.com/sdpa3cd-032g.html

(02:57:56 PM) Sleep_Walker: is it posible to attach (somehow easily) PATA HDD instead of SSD?
(02:58:37 PM) Sleep_Walker: I don't have my efika opened yet and I can't see this info on google
(02:58:44 PM) Sleep_Walker: Marex: btw. hi ;)
(02:59:09 PM) markos_: Sleep_Walker, nope, but in the smarttop you could replace the internal pata one with a bigger one -but they're expensive
(02:59:48 PM) Sleep_Walker: it's not some common connector? like 2.5" HDD?
(03:01:20 PM) markos_: no, it's an ssd chip with a small pata connector, wait
(03:03:43 PM) markos_: the smarttop uses this: http://www.getpartsonline.com/sdpa3cd-032g.html (well the 16GB version anyway)
(03:03:53 PM) markos_: $49 wow, that's cheap
(03:05:31 PM) Sleep_Walker: nevermind, I'll use NFS/NBD/iSCSI instead
(03:05:39 PM) Sleep_Walker: thanks for answer :)
(03:06:05 PM) markos_: er, wrong, the smarttop uses 8GB
(03:06:21 PM) NekoXP [~matt@cpe-67-11-135-209.satx.res.rr.com] entered the room.
(03:06:58 PM) markos_: and $99 for the 64GB version here, nice http://www.cpi-inc.biz/servlet/the-1428/SANDISK-64GB-LIF-SOLID/Detail 
(03:07:03 PM) markos_: I'm tempted
(03:07:21 PM) Sleep_Walker: I hope that next version will use some standard connector
(03:08:00 PM) markos_: it's a PATA SSD module, used a lot in industrial embedded applications