Angstrom/GPE binaries for the Archos 5
Binary distributions of the root filesystem, initramfs, and kernel built from the OpenAOS OpenEmbedded overlay, are available to download and install.
These binaries are intended to be installed on an Archos 5/7 unit with the Special Developer Edition (SDE) firmware.
Please note that there is little here to interest an end-user. These images are (I hope) improvements on the Angstrom version that comes with the Archos SDE, but they are still a long way from being useable on a day-to-day basis. In particular,there is no end-user wifi configuration. At present the only reliable way to configure wifi is to edit /etc/sysconfig/interfaces using vi in the terminal application.
Location
Binaries are available here:
http://www.openaos.org/~kevin/archos_angstrom_project/
In most circumstances, the latest revision is probably what you want.
Installation
This varies according to whether you want to install just the root filesystem, or an initramfs as well. It should not be necessary to install the initramfs unless you want multi-root support (see here).
To install a root filesystem, download and uncompress rootfs.img.gz, then copy to the Archos unit by booting into recovery mode and selecting `Repair disk'. This will made the disk available over USB, and you can copy the rootfs.img into the root of the USB drive, replacing the original. Please consider making a backup of the original rootfs.img in case the new one does not work. If you're using multi-root support, you can keep multiple root filesystems on the same unit, and make them available by editing the menu file.
If you want to install the initramfs as well, you need to download and copy to the unit initramfs.cpio.gz and zImage (the kernel). The SDE update process requires both these components even if you're only changing one. When you copied the files to the unit, boot into recovery mode, select `Developer Edition Menu' then 'Flash zImage and initramfs'.
Hints and notes
The uploaded images are exactly as the roll out of the build process, and can be improved considerably by the user with simple configuration changes. One such change that is worth trying is to enable auto-login, once you've created a new user account on the first boot. After all, since there's no password for root, there's not much point forcing ordinary users to log in. To enable auto-login, edit /etc/sysconfig/gpelogin -- the format should be self-explantory. Please note that the ability to auto-login as anything other than root was clearly not really anticipated by the GPE people, and I've had to make a lot of changes to get this to work at all. So there might still be problems with it.
It's also worth investigating the `look and feel' configuration in the Settings application group -- in particular, most users will likely want to increase the font size.
If you can get wifi working (which has to be a manual process right now), it's easy-ish to install other useful software, by opening a terminal and running
opkg install [package]
I've found the midori web browser quite easy to install this way. FireFox? is also installable, but it's not really usable on the A5. The abiword word processor works quite nicely but, at present, there is no printing support.
