More verbose listing of Software stack files?

Flinx pipnflinx at gmail.com
Wed Aug 20 06:52:58 CEST 2008



Ferenc Veres wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Flinx írta, 2008-08-18 23:01 keltezéssel:
>> Therefore I would propose a listing somewhere that would explain to new
>> users (like myself) which files do what, because the file names aren't
>> exactly clear.
>> 
>> Obviously something like this would take a bit of effort to maintain, but
>> would really benefit people who are just getting started.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Distributions and
> http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Download pages should answer all these 
> questions. They are long, and there are many options to choose (like 4-5 
> completely different distributions). So it may take some effort to get 
> an overview, what do you advice to make this cleaner?
> 
> I think nobody dares to clearly say, one is more important than another, 
> and elevate e.g. 2008.8 as "THE DOWNLOAD", and push all the rest in the 
> background as "alternate downloads". They are all important. This makes 
> it more difficult for new users.
> 
> Both those pages link to 
> http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Flashing_the_Neo_FreeRunner which explains 
> (and I think "Downloads" explains too!) that you need a kernel and a 
> root filesystem, and "Distributions" clearly state where to download a 
> kernel and a root fs.
> 
> Any comments are welcome from you on how to make these pages easier to 
> understand!
> 
> Thanks,
> Ferenc
> 
> 
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> 
> 

Ferenc

I guess I'm thinking more about how things are named once they arrive at the
download site.
To use OM 2008.8 as an example

Once the user clicks on 
"Latest stable release: http://downloads.openmoko.org/releases/Om2008.8/"

They see a directory like...

 Om2008.8-gta02-20080808.rootfs.jffs2  08-Aug-2008 10:33   68M  
 Om2008.8-gta02-20080808.rootfs.tar.gz 08-Aug-2008 14:46   49M  
 Om2008.8-gta02-20080808.uImage.bin    08-Aug-2008 10:41  1.8M  
 Om2008.8.rootfs.jffs2                 08-Aug-2008 10:33   68M  
 Om2008.8.rootfs.tar.gz                08-Aug-2008 14:46   49M  
 Om2008.8.uImage.bin                   08-Aug-2008 10:41  1.8M  
 md5sums                               16-Aug-2008 22:32  379   

Personally it doesn't really tell me a whole lot about what files are what.
I took a guess that "-gta02-" meant that Those were the ones for the
FreeRunner, and that ones without it were for the Neo 1973 (GTA01). 

Now, after reading all of the documentation about flashing, I came to
believe that ".uImage.bin" was the bootloader. Because "rootfs" seems to
have the entire root file system (kernel included) as that is how I would
understand a PC linux system to be. And I had no idea wha was in the tar.gz
but it looked important to have too.

It wasn't until after chatting on IRC that I found out which exactly files
from the above list I needed to download.

To be honest, I'm more of a hacker-by-night whereas more experienced
developers may be familiar with the naming conventions...

Am I trying to over simplify things?
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