Installing MeeGo Images on WeTab Tablet

Revision as of 21:00, 7 January 2011

Warning: the Pinetrail image running on the WeTab has some problems as of 1/6/2011. See below. Warning: as with any other device, if you incorrectly reflash the bootloader and/or kernel, you may brick your system.

What is needed:

1. A WeTab with power cable 2. sudo/root access on the WeTab 3. Two USB flash drives, one with a mountable filesystem already on it 4. A USB keyboard and mouse 5. Another Linux system for writing to the USB drives

Creating a bootable MeeGo drive

1. Plug the WeTab into the mains. You do not want the unit powering off or sleeping while you are reflashing!

2. Download pinetrail image from the [ http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/builds/ repo ]. I used meego-handset-ia32-pinetrail-mtf-1.1.80.13.20110105.1.img:

     wget http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/builds/1.1.80/1.1.80.13.20110105.1/handset/images/meego-handset-ia32-pinetrail-mtf/meego-handset-ia32-pinetrail-mtf-1.1.80.13.20110105.1.img

3. Follow [ http://meego.com/devices/netbook/installing-meego-your-netbook instructions ] for using image-writer to create a bootable image on one of the USB drives (Drive 1 hereafter).

Modifying the WeTab's bootloader

References: [ http://digitalorchard.blogspot.com/2010/12/wetabos-to-pure-meego.html 1] [ http://wetabz.blogspot.com/2010/10/using-plop-boot-manager.html 2 ]

4. Now that you have a bootable image on Drive 1, you need to modify the WeTab's bootloader to boot from USB. First download the latest version of plpbt. I used plpbt-5.0.11:

     wget http://download.plop.at/files/bootmngr/plpbt-5.0.11.zip

5. Unzip the archive and copy the resulting files plpbt.bin and plpbt.img to the second FLASH drive (hereafter called Drive 2).

6. Plug Drive 2 into the WeTab. From the WeTab's application launcher screen, choose the terminal window icon. Then:

     cd /boot/extlinux
     sudo cp /media/<your drive name>/plpbt* .
     sudo cp extlinux.conf extlinux.conf_dist
     cp extlinux.conf /media/<your drive name>
     umount /media/<your drive name>

7. Remove Drive 2 and plug it into the second Linux system. Then

     cp /media/<your drive name>/extlinux.conf /tmp
     <text editor of your choice> /tmp/extlinux.conf

Insert the following text at the top of the list of bootable images:

     label plop
     menu label ^plpbt
     KERNEL memdisk
     INITRD plpbt.img
     menu default

Save the extlinux.conf file and

     sudo cp /tmp/extlinux.conf /media/<your drive name>
     eject /media/<your drive name>

8. Plug Drive 2 into the WeTab, and from its shell prompt type

     sudo cp /media/<your drive name>/extlinux.conf /boot/extlinux
     umount /media/<your drive name>

Remove Drive 2. You are finished with it.

Install MeeGo onto the WeTab

9. Plug Drive 1 with the Pinetrail image into the USB drive.

10. Power the WeTab off. Power on, and while the blue LED is flashing, cover the soft button (circular sensor in upper left-hand corner of the surface to the left of the blue LED).

11. The plop bootloader with its green 1970s-era font will display. Tap the soft button to advance downward. Hold the soft button to select "USB."

12. The system should now come up in the MeeGo installer. Plug in the USB keyboard.

13. Choose "installation" or "live-boot" as suits you. Use the USB keyboard to make selections, as the touchscreen is not working! Sometimes it's possible to advance screens with carriage-return; at other places Alt-F will move Forward. Follow the installation instructions.

14. If you have installed MeeGo, you'll reach a screen which tells you to remove the flash drive and reboot. After removing the flash drive, plug in the USB mouse. At this point I got an X11 error indicating that the screen settings weren't detected; just ignore it, as the problem is temporary.

15. Reboot the system. You should now see the MeeGo UX launcher. Congratulations, you have installed MeeGo!

Problems

1. The touchscreen is unresponsive. (Presumably this is a driver problem.)

2. The UX launcher image does not utilize the whole display, which is unsurprising since Pinetrail is a handset image. (Presumably this problem is fixable with xrandr.)