Puppy Linux

I am porting Puppy Linux to run on the Mele A1000, have had preliminary success -- boot time from pressing power-on button to desktop loaded is about 18 seconds!

Here is my blog post announcing the first successful bootup: http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=02808

See other posts for further details: http://bkhome.org/blog/

The system that I use to build a Puppy is called "Woof". The way that I have set things up is there is a SD-card skeleton image, already setup to bootup for the target board. All that has to be done is add a kernel and the Linux filesystem -- plus of course the kernel modules and firmware in the filesystem.

This seems like the easiest way for Woof to build for any target board (that will boot from SD card).

Here is my skeleton image: http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/arm/sd-skeleton-images/

This is just the SD image that Tom uploaded, with almost everything taken out. Now compresses to about 7MB.

I have also created a PET package (the native package format of Puppy Linux) for the 3.0.8+ kernel, again it is the kernel that Tom uploaded: http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/arm/pet_packages-armv7/linux_kernel-3.0.8-mele-armv7.pet

Note, PET packages are tarballs with md5sum appended. You can expand it by doing this: tar -zxf linux_kernel-3.0.8-mele-armv7.pet ...and ignore the error message. it will expand into directory 'linux_kernel-3.0.8-mele-armv7'.

Alternative Puppy Linux distro

This is for those who have download limitations. The compressed SD-card image is only 87.1MB.

"Lui" is my codename for this build. Puppy built from Ubuntu Lucid Lynx armel binary packages. It is alpha quality. This is an SD-card image, for a 4GB card.

Download the image from here. The image file is only 87.1MB, includes all applications: http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/arm/releases/alpha/

Further explanation: http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/arm/releases/alpha/README-mele-sd-4gb-lui-5.2.90.htm

For those who are able to do bigger downloads, this alternative howto by cnxsoft is great; it creates a proper Ubuntu Precise Pangolin.

It is fairly easy for me to repeat the exercise, create a Puppy Linux SD image build based on Ubuntu Precise Pangolin packages. OK, I will do that next.

Please do read the "Further explanation" link, it lists some show-stopper problems.