Warning: the Pinetrail image running on the WeTab has some problems as of 1/6/2011. See below.
What is needed:
A WeTab with power cable sudo/root access on the WeTab Two USB flash drives A USB keyboard and mouse Another Linux system for writing to the USB drives
1. Plug the WeTab into the mains. You do not want the unit powering
off or sleeping while you are reflashing!
Creating a bootable MeeGo drive
2. Download pinetrail image from the repo. I used meego-handset-ia32-pinetrail-mtf-1.1.80.13.20110105.1.img:
3. Follow instructions
http://meego.com/devices/netbook/installing-meego-your-netbook
for using image-writer to create a bootable image on one of the USB drives:
[alison@tomales WeTab]$ tree /media/handset-ia32-x86_64-201101051428/ /media/handset-ia32-x86_64-201101051428/ |-- isolinux | |-- boot.cat | |-- initrd0.img | |-- isolinux.bin | |-- isolinux.cfg | |-- splash.jpg | |-- vesamenu.c32 | `-- vmlinuz0 `-- LiveOS
|-- osmin.img `-- squashfs.img
Modifying the WeTab's bootloader
Resources: http://digitalorchard.blogspot.com/2010/12/wetabos-to-pure-meego.html http://wetabz.blogspot.com/2010/10/using-plop-boot-manager.html
4. Now that you have a bootable drive, you need to modify the WeTab's bootloader to use it. 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 plpbt.bin and plpbt.img to the second FLASH drive.
6. Plug the second flash drive into the WeTab. From the 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 the flash drive and plug it into the second Linux system. Then
cp /media/<your drive name>/extlinux.conf /tmp emacs /tmp/extlinux.conf [or vim, or whatever]
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 file and
sudo cp /tmp/extlinux.conf /media/<your drive name> eject /media/<your drive name>
8. Plug the second flash drive into the WeTab, and from the shell prompt type
sudo cp /media/<your drive name>/extlinux.conf /boot/extlinux umount /media/<your drive name>
Remove the second flash drive. You are finished with it.
Install MeeGo onto the WeTab
9. Plug the flash drive 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.
15. The system now should come up with 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.)