Enchanted Objects: Let's work together to tame the ATMEL SMART SAMA5D4 Xplained Ultra kit

Great idea. I am in.

I want to try network booting with the rootfs on a NFS server. I let you know if and how it works.

I don't know if I'll have the time to help with this, since I almost have no time for the project itself and it doesn't involve the board. Sorry

However, if I manage to do something new with it, I'll post it right away.

Jan, a good suggestion but like @tanah I was never planning to include that board in my project. I am including the Yun and hope to have my first piece on getting going with that next week.

Cheers

Andy

Just a really quick note here as it is after 2:30am

I finally managed to get the SAMA5D4 to boot with an ubuntu kernel :-)  Version is 14.04

This includes a base ubuntu root file structure and I am currently running apt-get update.

Ok that worked and it updated its core files.

Just trying a sudo apt-get install ruby

and it also appears to be working.. finally. :-)

What I will try and do tomorrow, is make an image of the SD card and make it available for download.

I'll also compile some notes on exactly what I did to get it functional.

Great news!

I got a the built in Ubuntu running quite a while back with the help of a more software minded helper, but it was just after the start of the test so I don't remember most of the steps. I got to the point where I could access the command line via a serial terminal on my PC. Does anybody know how to get a GUI running on this thing via the HDMI, or even if it is possible to do this? As I am not using it for my project, so I have not given much time to it after the initial setup, but it is an interesting sub project. Heck, it might even replace one of my older PCs (a pentium 4 unit with 512 Meg of ram is definitely near the end of its life). A GUI would also make it an interesting candidate for wearable computing. It may be larger than a raspberry pi, but the better CPU should offset the extra size.

The built in unix on the SAMA5D4 Xplained s not quite the same thing as Ubuntu. It's the Yocto release and it is really a very vanilla flavoured unix implementation designed to power up an embedded SBC. You would probably have a great deal of trouble trying to address it directly and use it to implement a solution.

It has no precompiled package management support (well it does actually have something but it seems to have already installed all 350ish packages it knows) that I could find which immediately restricts it's usefulness.

Sure you can hop on and gain access to the device via the serial port, but thats about its limitation as far as application build goes. It does have a neat web server on it, so you could use it for that.

But if you want to add any other functionality you can't easily build it, as the OS doesn't contain the toolchain you need and there seems to be no way to get it onto the device, other than use dev tools on a separate platform and then uploading it to the SAMA5D4.

By creating an Ubuntu boot disk for it, we can bypass Yocto and use an operating system that most of us are more familiar with (due to Pi and the familiarity most of us have with Ubuntu & Debian). It allows the installation of all these

tools we are lacking and will boost our productivity.

I did notice that there was a HDMI dts. I haven't tried loading it yet, but soon.

I want to see if it will give me a terminal/console type HDMI output. I am guessing not, but I'll find out later today.

Sorry, it was the Unix, it was quite late when. I posted and I was very tired. I did spend a little while trying to upload new firmware, but I had some issues getting it to run properly and eventually gave up.

We've got a distro running at the moment that supports SSH for terminal access, HTTP server and SCP for file transfer.

I'll try to wrap up the details, but in essence it's the HTMI distro that Robert Peter Oakes describes in his video from SAMA5D4 Xplained Ultra - Tips and Tricks #1 - Getting Displays up and Running

I think that with these protocools up and running, and the cross-compilation chain working, we'll be able to build programs, load them to the linux distro and execute them on the board.

I am not sure that distro with HDMI opens up the display as much as we'd like it to.

I was able to print random garbage to the HDMI screen today, but my attempts at loading graphics of any type

weren't a success.  I drilled in further and tried both xwindows and kde and had some limited success.

I actually got the OS to display visually but then ran into trouble where my keyboard and mouse were non

responsive.  Either I am not running enough power through the board (I am just leeching off my USB port in my laptop).

Or there are some config elements I was missing, nothing I did though would make it recognize and react to the mouse or keyboard

in KDE.

Getting it to act as a console display was a non event.

It's basically a frame buffer, so it wants to be addressed as a framebuffer and not as a TTY or virtual TTY device.

Which makes me sad.

I did manage to install a native GCC toolchain onto the board and was able to do some coding there.

Right now I am writing out an image file of my 8Gb Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTD for Sama5d4.

Once I figure out where to upload it, I'll post a link. Zipped its about 195Mb. It's an image for an 8Gb microSD card, I've got a 16Gb one

here as well in case anyone is interested. Ok the upload is done for the 8Gb image.

You can grab the zip file from dropbox.

Burn the image to your microSD card using Windows Image Writer or similar.

Once you boot it up, you can see the default login name and password.

Once into the shell you should  sudo apt-get update

After that you are pretty much free to install your favourite tools.

try sudo apt-get install htop

It's a nicer version of top. :-)