[Arm-netbook] Release of SoM board KiCAD files with 2x100 pin ARM as a stepping stone

[jm]

On Tue, 2012-12-11 at 12:09 +0000, luke.leighton wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 11:55 AM, jm <joem at martindale-electric.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> > For the EOMA I also hope to make a single script if its not
> > redundant. But so far I haven't come across anyone that is offering up a
> > complete working Linux distro with sources and the know how on how
> > to make it fully documented from scratch.
> 
>  the technically correct, most useful and most minimalist approach is
> *not* to create a massive image, but to follow the technique shown by
> "debian installer", something like this:
> 
>  http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Arm/OtherPlatforms
> 
>  you then host an example initrd.gz (something like 5mbyte *not*
> 1gbyte - not even close) but you do *not* check that in to a repo.  if
> you want to build it from scratch, you provide a series of commands to
> do that, or just draw the line.
> 
>  you then check in the series of commands which performed the
> unpacking and re-packing of the initrd.gz, as well as a series of
> commands that rebuilt the kernel, all as a shell script, similar to
> this:
> 
>  http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/hacking_the_mele_a1000/cnx-ubuntu-script/
> 
>  or any of the others.
> 
>  a debian-installer image is both tiny and also gives the user the
> right to install as little or as much as they desire.
> 
>  a 1gbyte image is wasteful, difficult to handle, difficult to
> maintain, costly to maintain, awkward to use, and either contains too
> much or too little once finally installed.  worst of all worlds!
> 
>  they do however have their place: in development, a device may not
> necessarily have full internet connectivity, so it may be inconvenient
> to download from the internet.  but, even here, if you do the debian
> installer "ISO-on-usb-stick" image, you can put an ISO (as a file)
> onto the same media that the debian installer is on; debian-installer
> will hunt for it and loop-back mount it.
> 
>  pretty awesome stuff.
> 
> l.

I will read up and follow your advise.

But we have to disagree on some details here.

What I want is full linux from scratch with a script for those guys
that want to customize. i.e. Just one well maintained
script for a SoM. It will be hard to get it going I know.
And with that script and the KiCAD files, anyone can roll their own
hardware and a working distro to go with it.
If the engineer can get both their custom PCB into production
and the custom distro running in one week, I feel job done.

This summer gone, I was making a PCB a week and putting custom
embedded software into it as needed - obviously the tiny arms are
nothing compared to Linux, but looking at the bigger picture,
I see very little difference between A10 SoM and small embedded SoMs.

Also, this summer gone, I generated a lot of compiled images for
the small ARMs that I were using, and they get flashed into their
respective boards as needed. Instant gratification! Looking at the
bigger picture, precompiled images of Linux with all that software
pre-added is just a big image file!

For those that have some existing system such as a custom A10 SoM,
what I like them to have is an image they can boot from
without having to track down and compile everything. 1GB file
I can download in 5 minutes, upload in 10 minutes with modern
internet, and so passing compressed image files around
is a godsend for engineers that need specific types of images
(such as minimal Lubuntu, or a full KDE desktop, or a full Gambas IDE
developer environment) without having to roll their own.
I hope to to stock pile lots of image files with their respective SoMs
and scripts that created them. It is instant gratification for
engineers that want to do something by downloading an image and running
it.

For that don't want images as they are, they can go build from the
single script that made the original image or they can modify the images
and if they are generous, release it so that it can be stock piled
for someone else to use if its something good.

We all win.