Here I have updated to the kernel-3.6.y branch of raspberrypi's linux sources, forking dave's slackbuilds

https://github.com/Ponce/raspi-slackbuild
http://ponce.cc/slackware/slackwarearm-14.0/

the raspi-extras folder contains prebuilt packages of kernel, firmware and stuff and a new installer image (untested yet) that uses kernel 3.6.1 (I added ck and bfq patches to my kernel build), but I'm preparing new version of this thingies at the moment, the will be ready soon.

if you want to customize it, you can clone the repository, download the kernel using the scripts included, copying inside the untarred folder the included config as .config, modify it with make menuconfig and then save it in place of the old, so that when you run the build script for all the stuff it will use your new config.

The installer hangs on boot for me. 3 flashes of LED activity and that's about it. ;)

thanks ponce. I got those downloaded, and got the kernel and kernel source installed. I've built a kernel with rtc support, and built the ds1307 module. (it takes half a day or so)
(the ds1307 has an alias for the mcp79410 rtc which I have)
i can install the module with and it shows as rtc_ds1307 in lsmod
however I can't work out how to pass the i2c address to the module so that it works. the port is 6f
as shown by i have tried the method as per http://www.element14.com/community/g...rry-pi-via-i2c
ie but all I get is "no such directory" as i have a /sys/class/i2c-dev directory, but not a /sys/class/i2c-adapter directory. I don't know whether that is a difference between debian and slackware, or if there are some kernel options that I need to select to get these virtual configuration directories. do you have any ideas?

solution
 

well, a happy update. I found that once the module is loaded (modprobe i2c:mcp7941x ) then it can be configured with
now I have a /dev/rtc0 and and all work as expected (tested after a cold reboot after 5 minutes off, with the ntp entry commented out in /etc/rc.d/rc.local

for those wanting more details with a "howto" at the end, see http://www.element14.com/community/message/63602#63602

I've built a new one, if you want to try it

http://ponce.cc/slackware/slackwarea...extras-3.2.27/

@timsoft: the 3.2.27 kernel that you'll find in the folder above should have the module for your rtc device already built (if you want to test it) :)

thanks ponce. I'll give it a go. if it works just fine that will be one less step for the end user to take :-)
I may be a little slow as it is the 3.2.27 kernel, and i already have the 3.6.1 installed, so I might start fresh on a new sdcard which will take me a few days. i'll edit this post with the result.
edit: well, now you have updated the 3.6.1 to 3.6.6 I think I'll try that one first :-)
edit2: there seems to be a problem in the installer image - mount.cifs is not present so you cannot install from samba file server.
I have a separate problem with my monitor and hdmi where the screen blanks, which makes it very hard to do the install. If only the raspberrypi had a vga socket. :-(
edit3: the system boots as far as showing a raspberry icon, and then just hangs. I'll try your 3.2.27 installer and see how that goes instead

comment. the fat partition with the 3.6.6 installer was way too small. I had to resize it before I could install the kernel boot package, because it was full.

I just updated the 3.6.y stuff (now the kernel is 3.6.6 configured with extra modules), also the firmware and the userland libraries from the "next" branch

http://ponce.cc/slackware/slackwarea.../raspi-extras/

I'm testing it now running kernel and firmware on an unit and doing a fresh install of slackwarearm-14.0 on a 16 Gb SD card mounted on another unit: formatting the root filesystem (15 Gb) during the installation is taking hours (it's normal), but it seems to work fine.

EDIT: I'm installing the packages now (via NFS).
EDIT2: Installation finished successfully, rebooted and started xfce, razorqt and lxde (the fastest and less resource hungry of the three) on it. :)

Hi All,
I'm rebuilding my RaspberryPi, and I want to have the root fs on an external disk (via USB). I wrote the SlackwareARM installer image to the SD card, copied the SlackwareARM tree to my disk, and installed.
During the installation, I selected the partitions in the disk as my root and swap filesystems.

The installer even wrote the right root fs option to the cmdline.txt file (although I made an XFS filesystem but the rootfs option was still set to ext4), but the system is not booting.

When I turn the Pi on, it says "Waiting on root fs /dev/sda1", and I can see USB-related messages in the console, telling me that the drive is recognized. But at the same time, it looks like the partitions on the external drive are not being read, because the booting process stops at that point. If I disconnect & connect again, I can see the messages telling me about it, so the OS is not hung.

Any way I can debug this? I assume I don't have logs, given that the root fs is not mounted at that point. I read something similar in the RPi forums, but the person asking there had no replies.
I guess I could install in a different way and only move certain directories to the disk, and mount them later in the boot process.


Regards.

Hey Ponce,
May I ask what memory split you used?

I followed the advice in the official wiki and set gpu_mem=16 in /boot/config.txt leaving the maximum memory available for the operating system (240Mb on the 256Mb models)

http://elinux.org/R-Pi_Troubleshooti...U_memory_split

but if you want to try 3d apps or accelerated video playback you are better off with 64 or 128 instead of 16 (but you will have less memory available for your apps).

today I updated again the prebuilt stuff

http://ponce.cc/slackware/slackwarea.../raspi-extras/

P.S. I discovered (through my friend Reverend Slitta, I use FB once in a while) that The Man himself used it to install his own device :)

Thanks, just wondering, I've used 68 and an even splitIts Nice to know its not just a passing fancy :^)

I just wanted to say thanks Ponce, your installer worked perfectly last night!

Also, a tip for anyone who stumbles upon this thread in the future, probably the easiest way of providing an installation source for the Slackware installer is to rsync a local mirror to your computer and then run "python -m SimpleHTTPServer" in the root directory of your local mirror. This loads up a simple no frills HTTP server on port 8000 that you can use to install Slackware. You simply tell the installer to use "YOUR.IP.ADD.RESS:8000" and you're golden.

That's a great tip - thanks. I've added that to the docs in -current that I'll push out in the next batch.

I have discovered a new thing (that I should have tried before): If I use a pendrive instead of my SATA adapter (external HD) then the partitions are immediately recognized. May this be an issue of drivers? maybe the way the partitions are layed out on the disk? I know sometimes the system takes relatively long time to mount partitions on an external HD, but I waited for around 15 minutes and the partitions were not mounted. I tried several adapters and I get the same problem with all of them.

Any suggestions?


Regards.

Does the external hd have its own power supply? (I'm not even sure if they make SATA to USB adapters without their own power supplies)

The R-Pi's USB ports don't provide enough power for my external hd (which doesn't have its own power supply), so I need a powered USB hub to use it.

Well, I did some more testing with adapters borrowed from friends. All of them have their own power supply, as I'm using a 3.5" HD.

-> Adapter 1 (Maxtor OneTouch) doesn't boot. Correctly identified after the system is up.
-> Adapter 2 (mine, generic, no brand) Doesn't work. I think this one might even be dangerous to the Pi, because the Pi partially turns on (green led on, but not booting) when I plug it into the Pi's USB port. Also correctly identified and usable after the system is up.
-> Adapter 3 (Orico, SATA to eSATA/USB) boots OK.

I have one more to test, that eventually I could swap with mine. But it seems to be a matter of adapter quality.
I'm reinstalling the OS anyway because I formatted the drive as XFS and I think only EXT4 is supported (boot failed with Adapter 3 after loading the partitions).
Also, I don't know if it can be part of the problem, but as I created the swap partition first at the end of the disk, cfdisk put sda2 before sda1 in the disk partition table, and I want to change that as well.

Be careful not to deliver power into your Pi via the data usb connection. Power into my 1st Pi via a usb data cable from a powered usb hub fried it.

Hey timsoft, did you ever resolve this? I have the same problem with the installer img from Dec. 6.

I ended up grabbing a cutter and removing the path from the PCB to the VCC pin of the USB port (on the adapter, not the Pi, of course). No damages to the data paths, and no more +5V from the Pi. I wonder what the hell was the chinese guy that designed it thinking...

I had the same issue, and I think it is related to the console argument on cmdline.txt. The default provided by the installer didn't work for me, but I was able to see the output again once I changed it to tty1.

Thanks AlvaroG, worked like a charm.

thanks for the installer ponce. the latest one (3.6.7 kernel version) does not appear to have working samba client/ mount.cifs so it is just as well for dlachausse's really useful mini http server tip. the video output on my first pi seems to be faulty, so I bought another one (and a hdmi-vga pi adapter) to test. that seems to work reasonably ok (I can't use a manual vga switch without unplugging and re-plugging in the hdmi connector when I switch from my pc to the pi) (you had me fooled at first by hiding all the kernel output text:- I thought the pi had crashed, till after a minute or so it came up with the login). Unfortunately my rtc device is not being detected on the new pi. I did read that the i2c busses were swapped around on the p1 header, but I should still be able to detect it with either i2cdetect -y 0 or i2cdetect -y 1
now i have the new pi, and have a working ssh-able image I'll test the old pi again. The new one does seem to be noticeably faster with the extra ram. hopefully I can find an updated pin-out for p1 on the new pi and check if my rtc is ok. It is all running at 3.3V so it should be ok. -
edit: unfortunately my first pi seems to be dead. The lights (except for ok) light up, but using a working sdcard image from the other (new) pi, it does not work. - nothing on the screen, and cannot log in via ssh either (or view the web server which I set up on the image). :-(

Good day everyone.

Finally received my Raspberry PI, and of course first thing I did was installing Slackware on it. Thank you for all the people who made this step relatively simple with creating install images and detailed documentation.

I was promised by the supplier that I will get 512 MB version (kind of compensation for long waiting). But free shws only 256 Mb RAM. Not sure, I understand the booting process on ARM hardware. Do I need to update some configs\firmware in order to get 512 Mb recognized by the system, or does it mean that besides promises, I got 256 Mb version?

Thanks in advance for reply. (link to explanation of booting process would be also appreciated).

If you look at your pi, what color is your 3.5mm audio out? If it's black, you got the 256 one, blue, you got the 512. It should also say on the board itself what revision it is.

Thank you, will have a look when come back home.
At the same time looking on the invoice from RS Components Limited, it is written there that I have:
so it should be 512MB version.

PS just got home. Besides the invoice mentions 512 MB, it is 256 MB version. Very disappointed by RS Components Limited.... What else to say.

EDIT2: after I messed up with /boot partition, took ponce's install image and dd a fresh install, system recognises 512 MB of RAM, so it was due to software\firmware. If one have 512MB version, better to start with ponce's files. Thank you very much, ponce.

@manwichmakesameal
the audio out is indeed black coloured (well, dark gray colour), but it is 512MB board. Can make a pictures if anyone needs those.

Thats really wierd that the country of origin is china. I was under the impression that the 512M boards were being made in UK at a sony factory.

I thought that too, but not all of them are I guess
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/vi...p?f=23&t=24571

I also received a "Made in China" 512MB board

Has anyone succeeded in building midori for slackwarearm-14.0? I by mistake installed -current instead of 14.0, and webkitgtk build fails (after abt 27 hours), I tired of re-running build, but since I run the build via ssh in the background, couldn't fgure out what error message it gives. Would appreciate any feedback.

Hehe, I already have my Slackware server running on my Raspberry.

As always, thanks to every developer who has made this possible, and specially to the ones responsible of the ARM port of Slackware and the porters of the Slackware installer. When my budget allows, I will put some dollars here and there to support the cause.

I used ponce's November 11 installer image http://ponce.cc/slackware/slackwarea...extras-3.2.27/ and had no trouble doing an nfs install after rsyncing the repo (14.0) to my main box. It runs quite well.

Probably my lack of knowledge of the installer, but is there a way to get all the packages (automated) installed from patches/packages? I had to do a slackpkg update, slackpkg upgrade-all to get it up to date, still I will have to do that in the future anyway so no big deal. A curious thing though, mozilla-firefox didn't update, I did it manually by uninstalling 15.0.1 and installing 17.0.1 from the rsynced repo. Maybe because the exetension in 15.0.1 is armhfp (hard float I guess) and 17.0.1 is armv6j? Seems to run well enough. My Pi is the older 256MB RAM version too. Doesn't seem much different to raspbian in performance to me.

Many thanks ponce, and of course Stuart Winter and co.

I updated again all the stuff, setting /dev/tty1 as the console, that was a remainder from the kernel config from raspberrypi's devs I used as a base.

Seems like these have choosen for development (they switched to it as default in their repository) another end-of-life kernel (the 3.6 one): because I'm a bad-thinking-guy, I'm beginning to think they do it on purpose so they don't have to merge back the minor version's changes, lol.

Ok, guys. Finally during weekend had some time to look into the build process errors. It was simply out of memory problems. After I manually added swapfile with additional 512 Mb, the webkitgtk finaly built (not to start all over, I manually continued build process through /tmp/SBo/* files).
Now install webkitgtk and building midori, which I will put to the same directory. Here are the packages, built from SBo:
ftp://vt.dyndns-at-home.com/linux/ra.../packages/SBo/

Edit: midori doesn't start, giving segfault. Will rebuild all the above packages from the beginning and will upload those. Probably because I upgraded few packages during webkitgtk building process, the package is broken.

Thank you very much for the effort.

I got this error:I then ran /usr/bin/strace midori as ordinary user.. interesting errors..
Indeed they don't exist in Slackware at all, however if your locale had been set to en_GB it may work (will try soon) as those locale files do exist. I'll try it shortly. No, that fails too.
Could it be webkit because the compile got interrupted?

Ok. After 36 hours had new packages with the same problem. Now found this dscussion: https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs/issues/149. Trying to rebuild webkitgtk again, with --disable-jit. Will report once finished.

interesting... i got mine from Microcenter as part of a MAKE: kit (it came with power supply, hdmi cable, AV cables, a plastic box, a ribbon cable with header (and a protoboard and small components) and a 4GB SD card. mine says MADE in the UK

i've been running raspbian on it, but soon will be looking at a slackware install... i think i want to get a couple of extra SD cards before i do that though, there's a couple of different OSes i want to try on it (like Plan 9, Slack, and i'd like to try to build a Pi version of Tails)

That's pretty cool. I didn't know MAKE had a kit for it. I just picked up one of the MAKE electronics kits from Radio Shack. I also just ordered some 26 pin idc connectors so I can connect to the GPIO pins easier.

An accelerated X driver is now available for testing
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/vi...p?f=63&t=28294

Cool! But that kit brings any protection for the rpi?

If you're talking about the 3.3v on the GPIO pins, I don't think so. In fact, from what I've read, the Adafruit Pi Cobbler Breakout Kit that comes with it connects to the Do Not Connect pins as well. So you have to watch out for that.

I will wait for the new Gertboard! BTW: What kind of things are you doing with yours rpis?

Finally succumbed to temptation and ordered a Raspberry Pi last Wednesday (Jan. 16th). I wonder if anyone with sufficient knowhow is willing to write an article/howto about it for SlackDocs? There's a lot of good information in this thread, and scattered over the interwebbythingy, but it would be useful to get it all centralized.

I think people will have most Slackware+Raspberry documentation they need here:
http://www.daves-collective.co.uk/raspi/

It's not a task for the Granny, but hey, the only way to make it easier is by distributing pre built images of the SD card...

But yes, there is some extra information floating around that would be nice to have centralized. Now you "only" have to centralize it or find volunteers to do so :-D

Those who volunteered would win the Blessings of "Bob", and dwell in everlasting Slackness. :)

Does anybody know of a good piece of wifi hardware to work with a Raspberry Pi? I might try to make a backup home router out of it :-D

You can use anything that is supported by Linux. You may want to either use a powered USB hub, if you have a newer one without the polyfuses you should be OK.

Whoopeee! My Pi has landed!!! Posting from it now, running Raspbian, will sort out Slackwarearm sometime later.

EDIT
Why is it showing a Mac logo?

Are you sure you bought RPi? Perhaps you've bought a cheap iPad:)?

Mmm, could be. Those cunning devils at Apple, selling their overpriced stuff cheap. Well, they haven't fooled me. I'll send them a cheque for the difference in price.

Just out of curiosity, how is everyone building packages with their RPi? Cross compile? Build in VM?

I'm no expert (that's obvious to everyone :) ), but I was looking at this article, about cross-compiling a few days ago. Don't know whether it would be any use for Slackwarearm.