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Mer/Status/O2 Joggler

Mer is back : Please visit http://www.merproject.org to learn more about this news.

The o2 Joggler is a powerful digital photoframe by o2/OpenPeak. It comes with an Intel Atom CPU and touch screen control.

As it uses an EFI bootloader, it's rather simple to start other Linux versions than the built in using elilo.

Stskeeps has started a blog documenting the the tricks and sources needed to build different parts of the system: http://jogglerhacks.blogspot.com

Mer is a good choice as it is optimised for small screens and hardware support is good.

Mer will be installed on (and boot from) a USB stick and your Joggler's main OS should not be affected (although the usual caveats apply and there is a risk that you may brick your device).

Mer is still at alpha level so here are some notes on the OS once it is running to set expectations

- The tear browser doesn't work properly yet. "fennec"-Browser is a good alternative for the beginning
- The o2 Joggler has no backup battery or whatever for the hwclock. So we need to set the time once when mer is installed and later after each login and working network connection using "ntpdate" to always have the correct date. This is currently realized trough a rc.local file, which updates the time 4times in steps of each 30 seconds after login. So watch out to have a working wlan/lan connection during this period.

- There is no opengl support yet.

Other hardware works now completely: WLAN/LAN/USB/Sound*/Touchscreen - that's all the o2 Joggler offers.

• Sound still with troubles.

The mer-linux image for the joggler: A first "alpha image" can be found at:

http://www.gforums.de/juggler/mer-juggler-alpha_015.tar.gz

Please download/only use this if you own a Joggler device.

You also need a second file which contains the bootloader:

http://asdfghjkl.me.uk/files/joggler/efi-nokeyboard.tar.gz

(tested and working on Mer and Ubuntu MID)

Your USB stick should have 2 partitions: a 64Mb FAT16, a 512M (or larger) ext3 (not ext2)

After downloading the archives, untar them to your usb stick.

The efi-nokeyboard.tar.gz goes to the first FAT16 partition of your USB drive, mer-joggler...tar.gz to the second ext3 partition.

To do this on the command line in linux
cd to the path of your USB stick's first partition (the FAT16 one)

eg. cd /media/partition
Then

Run "sudo tar pzxvf /path to where you saved the tar files/efi-nokeyboard.tar.gz" to untar the efi.

Then cd the path of your USB stick's second partition (the ext3 one)

eg. cd /media/partition2
Then

Run "sudo tar --numeric-owner -pzxvf /path to where you saved the tar files/mer-juggler-alpha_015.tar.gz" to untar the mer OS.
note: The v in the -pzxvf above is optional, it just gives you a running list of what it is untaring as it goes.

Having done this,

1.) unmount your USB drive partitions and wait until you can remove them.
2.) turn off your joggler
3.) insert the usb stick
4.) turn on the joggler
5.) wait for mer to boot
6.) you should see the console screen. Wait some seconds and the welcome guide comes up. Enter all things needed.
7.) when done, you should see the desktop of mer Linux. Congrats!

Trouble Shooting: Some people have encountered problems booting Mer when using a USB hub. If you encounter read errors during the boot process then try connect your USB storage device directly to the Joggler without a hub.

To see, which files are changes in the x86 mer image, you can have a look at: http://www.gforums.de/juggler/mer4juggler-fix.tar.gz

Here is a list of all changes I have made:

- modified the startup script (99wizard) to ask for timezone, time, date
- modified x11 org file to work with the Joggler
- modified hildon menu entries (including two pixmaps) (added one for display standby and one to start the Joggler original software)
- inserted kernel modules from 2.6.30 as we use this kernel to boot
- added ntpdate for catching dater from internet
- added a modified rc.local and fsstab
- added a test mp3 for sound tests

That's it so far. I think I have to remove the mp3 file and openpeak stuff soon to have the image free from any licensed stuff.

t.b.c.

gforums

Modification to mer-efi.tar.gz (http://asdfghjkl.me.uk/files/joggler/efi-nokeyboard.tar.gz) by Hexxeh, Stskeeps, asdfghjkl:

- uses GRUB instead of refit, thus requires no keyboard input to boot.
- kernel version 2.6.30 fixes video issues.
- kernel is now stored on the FAT16 partition, making it trivial to upgrade from windows if/when required.