<div>Hi,</div><div> </div><div>I've been watching newbies (like me) struggling to get linux up and running on the mele A1000</div><div> </div><div>I remember going through this painfull process when hacking plug computer devices to get a debian CLI only (SSH) version on.</div>
<div> </div><div>the easy bit was buying a 3.3v nokia cable for a couple of pounds on ebay and chopping off the end and connecting to the serial port prongs on the plug computer (in my case i used an voltmeter, an old floppy drive cable connector and spliced the cables with insulating tape).</div>
<div> </div><div>the much harder bit (and i sense what a lot of newbies will struggle with) is having with a lack of understanding of the ARM and linux boot process and the huge amounts of tin foil hat jargon to wade through to get linux booting.</div>
<div> </div><div>a few people came together to help newbies like me out with a simple set of commmands to type in to the terminal to reconfigure uboot to boot from SD and compiled a 4GB SD card image (debian CLI/SSH) .. all a newbie then had to do after sorting out the serial port cable is follow a simple set of instructions to get uboot reconfigured and just image a 4GB SD card and boot .. it worked really really well and in addition the simple freebie SD card backup/restore imaging tool is really useful to back up SD cards (in effect system) images as well.</div>
<div> </div><div>I've really got to like administering the plug boxes over SSH rather than connecting to monitor/keyboard :-)</div><div> </div><div>Although the freebie program is a windows program (and i sense thats persona non grata here) i'll post the link and i'm sure there are bags of simple linux alternatives:</div>
<div> </div><div><a href="http://www.alexpage.de/usb-image-tool/">http://www.alexpage.de/usb-image-tool/</a></div><div> </div><div>Remember as well guys that newbies will struggle to even setup a suitable compilation environment and go through the process of getting the source compiling it and installing it on the target system.</div>
<div> </div><div>my vote is for a lean and fast Debian CLI only with SSH server (but im biased ;-)</div><div> </div><div>Hope it helps</div><div> </div><div> </div>