Hi, Am 17.05.2014 20:22, schrieb Isaac Martinez G.:

I got an ARM board on Ebay from Forlinx embedded. Nice piece of hardware and planing to use to control an exotic piece of laboratory equipment.

OK210 (you can search on Ebay for it)

Architecture: Cortex-A8 Processor: Samsung S5PV210 chip 512MB of DDRII 1GB of flash

1GHZ clock

I took a look a the wiki... given that the board is obviously not on the list.

I downloaded the files (still deciding which one to use):

openSUSE-13.1-ARM-JeOS.armv7-rootfs.armv7l-1.12.1-Build33.1.tbz

and

openSUSE-13.1-ARM-JeOS.armv7-rootfs.armv7l-1.12.1-Build33.1.tbz

Those two look identical to me? ;) For a beginner, 13.1 is a safe choice, in case you were considering Factory as alternative (pretty usable recently, but you never know).

The instructions and wiki are not exactly great for non hardcore programmers.

"And make your own SD card to boot on, with first bootloader (manufacturer specific), U-Boot (configured for your board) and a kernel (configured for your board) if openSUSE does not provide it"

Could anybody explain or point out where I can get more information on actually how to do it????

The point is that there are no generic instructions, it does highly depend on the board. Usually the manufacturer's website has either instructions how to do it or a downloadable image that you can peek at using parted etc. Finding that information or figuring it out is the biggest obstacle in adding board support... Which bootloader(s) are required for the board? While I don't know the OK210, I have access to a board with an S5PV210: The armStoneA8 uses a preinstalled proprietary firmware NBoot in flash, which then loads U-Boot - also in flash. Other boards load U-Boot from an offset inside an unformatted first partition on the SD card, the Raspberry Pi even from a FAT partition. How can your bootloader load the kernel? U-Boot imposes how to further set up your partitions - in the best case your U-Boot is upstream and/or supports (or can be patched to support) ext4, then you can do one big ext4 partition with rootfs and kernel. Otherwise you'll have to prepend another partition for kernel/initrd, with preference from ext3, ext2 down to fat - I usually take ~100MB. Preference is usually for booting from SD card because of flexibility to fix on another machine or to some day exchange it in case of wear. Other boot options might include USB, SATA, TFTP and NFS. Which kernel format to choose? If bootz command is available in U-Boot, use a zImage; otherwise use a uImage (bootm command). Device trees S5PV210 does still not support the multi v7 kernel config upstream, so you can likely ignore anything you read about .dtb files for now. Graphics Note that the S5PV210 has a PowerVR SGX540 GPU, for which no real Open Source driver exists today: http://powervr.gnu.org.ve/doku.php HTH, Andreas -- SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer; HRB 16746 AG Nürnberg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-arm+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-arm+owner@opensuse.org