Revision as of 16:03, 18 November 2010

MeeGo IVI on Beagleboard

This page describes how one installs the MeeGo IVI image on a Beagleboard C4

Executive Overview

1. Format your SD card
2. Use mic2 to create an image
3. Place image on SD card
4. Boot Beagleboard from SD card

Formatting your SD card

I recommend using an 8 Gig SD card. This gives you room to download new packages, compile software, and generally experiment right on the board itself.

Instructions on formatting your SD card for use on the Beagleboard can be found here. This is the canonical source for card formatting and nothing I could add here would be more useful than that page.

Creating a root file system

mic2 is a the tool for creating "images" which are essentially snapshots of an entire file system. Using mic2 you download a set of binary packages built for your target architecture which you specify in a kickstart file. Here is is the command I used to create an image for the Beagleboard;

sudo mic-image-creator --run-mode=0 --cache=x-cache --format=loop --arch=armv7l --release=daily --compress-disk-image=none --config=ivi-armv7l-beagle.ks

You can change these parameters if you want a different type of image, read the instructions for mic2 for more information. It is worth noting that your cache holds lots of downloaded packages, so the next time you run this command you'll just pull down the delta of changes from the online repos making it fairly efficient for you to update your rootfs often.

Transfer image to SD card

Texas Instruments (TI) provides drivers for 3D graphics acceleration. TI supplies these drivers under the Creative Commons Public License. These drivers are not supplied as a package that you can easily integrate, instead you'll have to run a program to download these drivers if you want them included in your root file system. To ingrate the drivers you can use this script designed to be run on an X86 platform. More information is here.

Once you've installed the SGX drivers, you can move to building your root file system (rootfs). The root file system lies on the second partition and contains all the executables aside from the kernel. To place the rootfs on your SD card, mount the image that mic2 created. You can do that this way;

mkdir loopback
sudo mount -o loop ./daily/ivi/images/meego-ivi-armv7l-beagle/meego-ivi-armv7l-beagle-daily.img loopback/

This attaches the rootfs physically onto the "loopback" location on your hard drive. You can then move into the "loopback/" directory and copy over the entire file system onto your mounted SD card. This command will do that for you;

sudo rsync -aHx --progress --delete loopback/* /media/MeeGo/

Some important things to note here:

• I am calling the partition on the SD disk "MeeGo", you can choose a different name when you partition your SD card
• I am calling my loop mounted directory "loopback", you can choose a different name
• rsync can be called with different options, or you can use another tool

Troubleshooting

Error Message: "WARNING: GFX_3_01_00_06_libs.tar.gz does not exist, skipping PVR setup!"
Cause: This message is coming directly from your kickstart file
Fix: Make sure you have your GFX tarball in a location that the kickstart file can see it. Usually this means the same directory.

Other resources

MeeGo Image Creation
MeeGo on the Beagleboard from Scratch