[Arm-netbook] Side-Topic: Liberating PocketCHIP

[Pablo]

On Sun, May 07, 2017 at 04:36:40PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> On Sun, May 7, 2017 at 4:17 PM, Pablo <pablo at parobalth.org> wrote:
> 
> > To flash your deblobbed image beware of the closed-source flashing tool for the Chrome browser and use the strange “Ubuntu virtual machine
> > SDK solution”. I read somewhere that one NextThing developer flashes
> > right from his Debian box but this way is not officially supported.
> 
>  jaezuss this kind of thing pisses me off.  there is *NO NEED* for
> proprietary tools with the A13 (R8), the A20 or any other allwinner
> processor.  
I agree. Just to be sure I looked again if I can find the source of the
Chrome browser extension.
I only found this forum thread where "hippiehacker" searches for the source
and gets no answer:
https://bbs.nextthing.co/t/chip-flasher-on-github/5561/10
So it seems I have been correct and it is proprietary.

>fex-boot has been in sunxi-tools for at least FOUR YEARS
> since i helped hno and others with the USB-sniffing of the FEL
> protocol.
What I called the strange "Ubuntu virtual machine SDK solution" is
documented here:
https://docs.getchip.com/chip.html#installing-c-h-i-p-sdk
Basically they recommend to install a huge virtual machine image to
create a "level" playing field for all users and then use a bunch of shell-scripts called CHIP-tools to flash images from within the virtual machine.
CHIP-tools require sunxi-tools:
https://github.com/NextThingCo/CHIP-tools

So they use sunxi-tools but in a quite comlicated way.
A documented and tested command-line solution for the major
distributions would have been the way to go...

Pablo