When I bought this device for 5€ on a craigslist app, it was listed as faulty. The netbook was bricked somehow and reinstalling the manufacturer's firmware fixed it. This leaves you on an Android 2.2 not usable nowadays.
As an CRUX Linux fan I am, I wanted to make this netbook run it, so I started searching the net to see if anybody had already made linux possible on it.
This netbook device lacks documentation out there. It's those kinds of digital gifts they give away with newspaper subscriptions, so first installation on it will take a bit of work.
The only thing I found was a Debian port for these netbooks, using the kernel from a preinstalled Android distro. This Debian port works, but isn't very well optimized, and for example, boot time takes almost 2 long minutes.
So here I will detail the process I have followed to get a base CRUX Linux system running in this netbook, but I will skip the kernel build process for now (I'll detail that in a separated document).
- Processor VIA C7-M
- Bios 1MB Flash ROM
- Chipset VIA VX800U
- Main Memory DDR2 256MB/512MB/1GB (depends on model)
- LCD Display 7” TFT LCD
- Graphics Embedded. Display Mode 800x480
- Modem 56Kbps, V.90/92 support
- LAN & WLAN Built-in Ethernet
- Interface I/O Ports
- Line out
- Mic in
- DC in
- RJ-11 connector for modem
- RJ-45 connector for Ethernet
- 2 USB ports
- VGA out
- Audio Internal stereo speakers
- Internal mono microphone
- Card Reader 3-in-1: SD/MMC/ MS
- Built-in Touch Pad with 2-way scroll function
To boot for the first time we need a kernel and a bootloader stuff so I will use Kirbian as a base to create a custom SD card (>=2GB)
$ wget https://phoenixnap.dl.sourceforge.net/project/kirbian/Linux/kirbian_18.1_armhf_minimal.7z
$ 7z x kirbian_18.1_armhf_minimal.7z
$ sudo dd if=kirbian_18.2_armhf_minimal.img of=/dev/sda bs=1M conv=fsync
The SD card will contain two partitions:
$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 7,22 GiB, 7744782336 bytes, 15126528 sectors
Disk model: SD/MMC/MS PRO
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x000ddf56
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 16065 57024 40960 20M 4 FAT16 <32M
/dev/sda2 64260 3839534 3775275 1,8G 83 Linux
Mount root partition to inspect contents and copy some files:
$ sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
$ mkdir kirbian-files
$ cp -a /mnt/etc/securetty kirbian-files
$ cp -a /mnt/lib/firmware kirbian-files
$ cp -a /mnt/lib/modules/2.6.32.9 kirbian-files
$ cp -a /mnt/boot/config-2.6.32.9 kirbian-files
$ sudo umount /mnt
Delete the second partition and resize it to whole available space. I will use this partition later for CRUX-ARM. New partition table look like this:
$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 7,22 GiB, 7744782336 bytes, 15126528 sectors
Disk model: SD/MMC/MS PRO
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x000ddf56
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 16065 57024 40960 20M 4 FAT16 <32M
/dev/sda2 64260 15126527 15062268 7,2G 83 Linux
Format root partition with ext2 or ext3 since ext4 is not supported by the kernel I will use
$ sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda2
Since kernel version 2.6.32 I will use CRUX-ARM 3.2 which is the last one with glibc support for this kernel version.
$ wget https://resources.crux-arm.nu/releases/3.2/crux-arm-rootfs-3.2.tar.xz
$ wget https://resources.crux-arm.nu/releases/3.2/crux-arm-rootfs-3.2.tar.xz.md5
$ md5sum -c crux-arm-rootfs-3.2.tar.xz.md5
Uncompress CRUX-ARM 3.2 to root partition on SD card
$ sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
$ sudo tar -C /mnt -xf crux-arm-rootfs-3.2.tar.xz
Copy files from backup we made to root partition on SD card. Also edit some important files and umount the partition.
$ sudo cp kirbian-files/securetty /mnt/etc
$ sudo cp -a kirbian-files/firmware/* /mnt/lib/firmware
$ sudo cp -a kirbian-files/2.6.32.9 /mnt/lib/modules
$ sudo chown -R root:root /mnt/etc/securetty /mnt/lib/{firmware,modules}
$ sudo vim /mnt/etc/fstab
$ sudo vim /mnt/etc/rc.conf
$ sudo vim /mnt/etc/rc.d/net
Finally we need to do some tricks. Since we are using a third-party kernel.
The kernel lacks support for devtmpfs (CONFIG_DEVTMPFS=y) so I need a trick to run udev.
- Replace
/sbin/start_udevwith this file: start_udev - Download and copy these udev rules to
/etc/udev/rules.d:
Umount the root partition and the SD card is now ready!
$ sudo umount /mnt
I have tried to get CRUX-ARM 3.6 running on this device and failed.
I have also tried 3.5, 3.4 and 3.2 but the problem was the same: FATAL: kernel too old
# wget https://resources.crux-arm.nu/releases/3.6/crux-arm-rootfs-3.6.tar.xz
# wget https://resources.crux-arm.nu/releases/3.6/crux-arm-rootfs-3.6.tar.xz.md5
# md5sum -c crux-arm-rootfs-3.6.tar.xz.md5
# mkdir /crux-3.6
# tar -C /crux-3.6 -xf crux-arm-rootfs-3.6.tar.xz
# mount --bind /dev /crux-3.6/dev
# mount --bind /proc /crux-3.6/proc
# mount -t sysfs sysfs /crux-3.6/sys
# chroot /crux-3.6
FATAL: kernel too old
Unfortunatelly a newer kernel can't be built for this device. I forked a branch create from some guys from InfoTM for IMAPX200 based devices but even that is prepared for crosscompilation and requires some work for being used today.
On the other hand, Glibc >= 2.24 requires a kernel 3.2.x which makes more difficult to run a decent CRUX-ARM version on this device.
My solution to keep alive this device is to use CRUX-ARM 3.2 + my own port overlay where contribute recent ports whenever be possible.
Since 3.2 is a bit old we will need to fix some packages to get wireless networking
First we should fix the source url for wireless-tools:
# diff -purN /usr/ports/opt/wireless-tools/Pkgfile Pkgfile
--- /usr/ports/opt/wireless-tools/Pkgfile 2010-09-22 02:03:27.000000000 +0200
+++ Pkgfile 2021-12-19 17:59:19.000000000 +0100
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
name=wireless-tools
version=29
release=2
-source=(http://www.labs.hpe.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/${name/-/_}.$version.tar.gz)
+source=(https://hewlettpackard.github.io/wireless-tools/wireless_tools.$version.tar.gz)
build() {
cd ${name/-/_}.$version
To get wpa_supplicant working we also need to fix sources for expat dependency. In this case version 2.2.0 is no longer downloadable from any place as it was marked as vulnerable release. The original file in sourceforge was renamed to expat-2.2.0-RENAMED-VULNERABLE-PLEASE-USE-2.3.0-INSTEAD. It was uploaded on 2021-03-25. 2.3.0 was also marked as vulnerable: https://sourceforge.net/projects/expat/files/expat/2.3.0/expat-2.3.0-RENAMED-VULNERABLE-PLEASE-USE-2.4.1-INSTEAD.tar.gz/download
Source url for wpa_supplicant also changed to: https://w1.fi/releases/wpa_supplicant-2.6.tar.gz