[Arm-netbook] mele a1000 - best way to get newbies up and running

[David Given]

On 29/03/12 21:50, lkcl luke wrote:
[...]
>  right now, this list and the rhombus-tech wiki are *specifically* for
> people who *specifically* are prepared to go through the list of
> tasks, with the persistence and the patience required.

FWIW, I have just spent the evening successfully unbricking a 2009
Android featurephone with no touchscreen, running cupcake, armed with
nothing but a USB cable, a Debian box, a spare (working) phone,
patience, and a healthy disrespect for the alleged 'engineers' who put
together the half-baked Android build (adb is *only* available via
TCP!). My A1000 is on order.

That said, given the device is capable of booting directly from SD card,
it should be trivial to (eventually) produce a Debian installer that
just gets written to the card and booted, right? Traditional console via
USB keyboard and monitor, so no TTL serial stuff required?

If so, that sounds like the easiest way to get people started, and
should also attract the XBMC crowd (buy device! Drop HDD in slot! Insert
XBMC SD card! Boot! Play!).

[...]
> this is why i keep on being so damn persistent that people record
> things on the wiki, because that is the sum of the knowledge of all of
> us, as we're moving forward, learning things as we go.

Beware! Wikis are very good, but also very bad. Anyone who's ever tried
to look stuff up on the NSLU2 wiki knows this. There's a lot of good
information in there, but it's so swamped in obsolete, badly organised,
uncategorised and just plain *wrong* information it's impossible to find.

Wikis are *great* for making notes, but absolutely *suck* at being
definitive, organised, up-to-date or accurate. Nothing beats actual
documentation written by someone who actually knows what they're doing,
and unfortunately this is work, and not very fun work either. Right now
the community's small enough that a wiki is ideal, but eventually we are
going to need editors.

-- 
┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ───── http://www.cowlark.com ─────
│
│ "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by
│ stupidity." --- Nick Diamos (Hanlon's Razor)

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