SliTaz ARM is not compatible with Raspberry Pi B+ hardware

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SliTaz ARM is not compatible with Raspberry Pi B+ hardware

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Started 9 years ago by ThatOneGuy
Latest reply from Ragnar
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ThatOneGuy

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I have been working for a few days on getting SliTaz Arm (with GUI) installed on my Raspberry Pi B+. I have managed to get it installed as per the instructions and, aside from the read-only root bug in the install script that was later fixed, everything went off without a hitch and I was able to boot up the image.

The problem is that SliTaz ARM does not initialize the USB hardware on boot. There is no mouse, keyboard, or ethernet support, which means that there is no way to actually interact with the OS. I have managed to play around with the boot settings to get it to auto-login and set the keyboard layout correctly, but it still doesn't provide power to the hardware.

If I use the newest Raspbian kernel to boot up the system I can get it to start in text-only mode with keyboard support, but all of the apps are broken at that point and the desktop cannot be started.

Has anyone experienced this issue and managed to get past it? If so, please let me know how.

I would love to use this OS since it's much smaller and faster than wheezy (and the other similar alternatives) and doesn't eat up nearly as much RAM as PiCore.

Posted 9 years ago #
kultex

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I dont think so - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi it might be, that your power adapter does not provide enough electricity....

try to use a usb switch

Posted 9 years ago #
mojo

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It appears the Model B+ requires a different firmware,configuration of the boot loader and kernel.
The B+ uses a different USB controller chip.
Reference:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=98019
http://elinux.org/RPi_Upstream_Kernel_Compilation

Considering the slitaz-rpi install tarball 20140309 pre-dates the release of the B+ 20140714
I think it's safe to say that slitaz-arm doesn't support Model B+

Posted 9 years ago #
revlchurch

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Yeah I found that out the hard way myself. Spent over a week restepping myself thinking I was messing up something on my end. Glad to know I wasn't the only one experiencing this but it is a shame since SLITAZ would seem to be the perfect match for this SBC.

Posted 9 years ago #
ThatOneGuy

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It's good to know what the problem is, but it's unfortunate to know that there's no way for me to fix this on my own without completely rebuilding the Raspberry Pi kernel and creating a custom bootloader.

With the release of the new Raspberry Pi 2 I'd hope that someone on the development team decides to fix these problems so that people who have newer hardware can actually use their OS. I suppose we'll see in time.

Posted 9 years ago #
revlchurch

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Shouldn't there be a caveat posted on the slitaz-rpi pages?

Posted 9 years ago #
emgi

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Slitaz-RaspBerryPi is a very good initiative but in its current state it is pretty useless for the average user. You simply cannot do enough with it due to the lack of available packages. As it is, Raspbian is virtually unbeatable when it comes to the number of available packages. We would need at least the same number as v4.0 stable to get some appreciation. I'm willing to help where I can but even the documentation cannot be edited by registred users.
And then I'm not even mentioning the bugs...

Now this doesn't sound very positive and I'm not intending to blame anyone for this. I realize how much work is needed, even to get to where we are now. Still it is regrettable that the development seems to have stopped. The RPi has a huge potential to increase the name & fame of slitaz, probably even more than Slitaz v5.0 (where most development effort currently seems to go). Fact is that there are countless alternatives for v5.0 but only a handful for the RaspBerry Pi. Now is the time to step into that gap.

/emgi

Posted 9 years ago #
kultex

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sorry I dont find the RPI kernel config in slitaz-arm, but it should not be that big problem to add

+CONFIG_USB_DWC2_HOST=y

Posted 9 years ago #
tiziano

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@emgi.
You finally got the point with SliTaz and Raspberry. According to my experience can doubtless agree with you completely. As matter or fact Raspbian is unbeatable indeed. Fact is also that apparently SliTaz developers are not much interested in spending additional efforts with Raspberry.

Posted 9 years ago #
ThatOneGuy

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The problem I have with the "unbeatable" Raspbian OS is just that any interaction with the GUI causes the CPU usage to spike, which in turn causes operation to slow to a halt. Just moving the mouse cursor within the programs menu in a circular pattern for a few seconds caused the CPU usage to climb steadily upwards of 75%. That is with nothing running except for the desktop environment. Of course, I won't be interacting with it all that much. It's just that it's so sluggish, takes a while to boot, and requires so much disk space that I don't really like it.

PiCore does not really have that issue since its desktop environment is much less processor-intensive, but it just takes up so much RAM and it's about as slow as Raspbian at boot time because it loads the entire OS and programs into RAM at boot.

I also wanted to try out the PiBang OS since I heard great things about that one, but it has similar problems as SliTaz that have arisen after it stopped being developed.

From my experience of SliTaz running fairly smoothly within qemu on Windows and the ridiculously quick boot time on the RPi, I can assume it's a much better environment for running an embedded system with windowed application support than Raspbian is.

Package support really isn't much of an issue. As long as I can access the GPIO pins, can run a basic fullscreen ARM-Linux program, compile and run C and C++ programs, and install and use OpenCV, then I will have all I need. If it's like the Moebius OS with nothing pre-installed and absolutely no packages available, then I guess I might be better off elsewhere.

Posted 9 years ago #
kultex

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can somebody help me to find the arm kernel config - please

http://hg.slitaz.org/wok/file/e0a72cb63515/linux/stuff/arm/linux-arm.config

thats the only one I can find.....

or somebody can check it on his Pi - I just have installed Raspbian on mine..... had no time until no to install also SliTaz

Posted 9 years ago #
Ragnar

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May GOD bless you all. This is Ragnar from Venezuela. Is there any .img file for the Slitaz ARM available?. I'm planning on testing it in QEMU but I have seen nothing on the web.
I'm learning Linux with Slitaz 4.0 and it's amazing. What I did though, was follow the installation instructions from here http://arm.slitaz.org/codex/pibook.html#install in a real SD card and created an .img file with dd. Since the installation on the SD card worked flawlessly, I thought the .img from it would run well on QEMU. It did not.
Would anybody be kind enough to help me out please? I know nothing about cooking or creating my own linux distro but I'm willing to do anything in order to have mu Slitaz ARM in a portable QEMU Virtual Machine. Thanks in advance.

Posted 7 years ago #

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