1. Burning an OS image to the nand of the mini210S
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  3. I decided it was about time I played with linux on the mini210S, so I used the user manual guide to burn linux to the nand and this is what I found out :)
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  5. things you will need
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  8. 1x micro SD card (4GB recommended, backup any data on teh card before starting, if you're on vista/win7 it will wipe the card)
  9. 1x mini210S dvd iso downloaded from the friendlyarm ftp, opened in your favorite iso mounter/editing app or burned to dvd
  10. 1x Windows PC
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  13. They recommend to use a 4GB sd card, formatted to fat32, this is purely for card compatibility, in reality, the images folder on the mini210S dvd iso is under 1GB in size, so if you've only got a 1GB card, it's worth a try :)
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  15. Burning Superboot to the SD card
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  18. Make sure that your SD card is formatted to fat32 and backed up before you start!
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  20. Go to the tools\ directory on the mini210S dvd, if you're using win7/vista, right click on SD-Flasher.exe and choose 'run as administrator', i you're using XP, just run the app. as normal, in the small window that pops up, click the radio button next to 'mini210S' then click 'next'.
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  22. You will now see the main window of the SD-Flasher app, click on the button with '...' on it, browse to the mini210S dvd, then go into the images folder, then select the superboot210.bin file and click the open button. SD-Flasher needs this file to be able to burn it to your SD card.
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  24. Next click on the 'Scan' button, after a few seconds, the section marked 'SD Drive(s)' will become populated with your SD cards details. If you're on XP you can skip this step and just go onto the next one, if you're on Vista/win7 then continue reading. For vista/win7 we need to use a slightly different method to get superboot210.bin burnt to the SD card, so click on the 'ReLayout!' button, this will wipe all of the data from the card, click 'yes' if you've backed your data up or it's a freshly formatted card.
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  26. This next step is the same for XP or win7/vista, simply click on the 'Fuse' button to burn superboot210.bin to the SD card. That's it for burning superboot to the SD card, the next step is to copy the necessary files to burn linux to the nand onto the SD card.
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  28. Dumping the image files onto the SD card
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  30. In the manual, it suggests that you can test whether you burnt superboot to the SD card by putting it into the uSD socket, flipping the boot mode switch (left hand switch as the ethernet port faces you) and it should show you 2 flashing leds when you boot, which didn't happen in my case, all I got was a screaming banshee, which I believe indicates either a card not present, or no valid images files found.
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  32. The manual also says to dump the whole images folder onto your SD card but we're only messing with linux, so we don't need all the extra stuff :)
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  34. On your SD card fat32 partition, create a folder called images, next open the images folder on your mini210S dvd iso, select the linux folder, superboot210.bin and friendlyarm.ini, copy them and paste them into the SD card images folder.
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  36. Setting up friendlyarm.ini to install linux
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  39. We're nearly done, now all we need to do is setup the friendlyarm.ini file so that superboot burns the image onto nand, so go to your sd card and open \images\friendlyarm.ini in your favourite text editor.
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  41. As far as I know, superboot only works with one image at a time, so we're just concentrating on linux, only thing to do is change line 5:
  42. OS = Android
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  44. to
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  46. OS = Linux
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  48. Save friendlyarm.ini and close your text editor
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  50. That's it for setting up the SD card. I believe the methods are slightly different for android and win ce, with winCE you have the option to run the image from SD card instead of burning (I think), for Android, depending on which version you want to install, 2.3 or 4.0.3, you'll have to comment out the irrelevant android section in the friendlyarm.ini file.
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  52. Burning it all to nand
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  55. Now we've setup the SD card with superboot where the bootloader can find it, got the kernel zImage and and rootfs image where superboot can find it, it's time to burn it all to nand, fun times!
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  57. Make sure the mini210S is turned off, insert your uSD card into the uSD socket, switch S2 to SD (left hand side switch, switched to the back) and power on the mini210S, you should hear a quick beep.
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  59. You will now be presented with superboot, giving you various information about the mini210S (cpu, ram, nand, TS and LCD type), at this point the burning process is totally automatic, you should see it quickly burn superboot and the zImage to nand, then it will start burning the rootfs image, this will take some time, you should see the progress bar fill up, you will also notice that the led 4 is flashing and as the progress bar goes over 25%, 50%, 75%, it will make a led go solid and start to flash the next one until it's finished.
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  61. Once the burning process has finished, the mini210S will beep twice and you will see some instructions in yellow on the lcd, you will also notice that your mini210S is now doing a knightrider impression!
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  64. Testing it worked
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  67. Follow the instructions on screen and switch S2 back to nand boot mode and power cycle the mini210S, after a few seconds you will be greeted with Tux, after about 25 seconds, you will see a few services go live on the lcd and then you should be presented with the TS calibration screen, as is standard with these devices, touch the calibration points (boxes with crosshairs in them!) one by one to calibrate the touchscreen.
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  69. Next up pick your language (You can have any language you like apparently, as long as it's english:us :D), setup the time and timezone and you're done.
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  71. Changing the language
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  74. You should now be presented with a window with a number of tabs, unfortunately, it's all in chinese, as I'm english I needed to change the language.
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  76. To do this yourself, tap on the 2nd tab, then using the scroll bar, scroll down, until you can see a icon that has a chinese flag over the top of a british flag and tap it, in the app. that opens, click on your preferred language (english, chinese or japanese), then click OK, qtopia will now restart and you should now be able to see all the tabs and icons in your chosen language.
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  78. That's about it for my testing, the rest is down to you to have a look around in the menus and see what it can do, don't forget to refer back to the manual for more information about the apps/options that you can configure.