[Gen8 General] MnF:
Scholbert, I want mythfrontend on the tablet natively. I have a huge myth install in my house and it is the ultimate aim for me, and no mythfrontend exists for android. And linux is what Ive hacked about with for years, android is all new to me mostly and Im too old now to learn java :)

For the UI, I have enlightenment on it with the bodhilinux.org packages, and they are truly nice to behold. And they have taken time to prepare a tablet friendly E setup, which flows nicely. I spoke with the lead dev there and he said if I can come up with a squeezy based build with bodhii E on it, they will host it for people to try.

For kernel, I want to try a newer one than is in the open Aos images, there have been a lot of changes to the omap drivers since 2.6.29, in fact on omapedia I read that Ti have pushed changes back into the kernel instead of maintaining a private kernel branch. Now it appears the omap fb driver honours the rotation directive (the 2.6.29 one does not), and I can build a nfs module too. And a mpeg2 stream capable framerate would be perfect since I already have a working but incredibly slow mythfrontend on there.

I am using qemu, because I can put all my tools on the slice without running out of space, and the a101 itself seems to get hot when running cc1 for extended durations. So I was worried the passive cooling would not be enough to compile a kernel without causing some damage ( I wonder if this is what archos were hinting at when they said install of angstrom would invalidate all warantee's, hardware included). So Im fine to leave the desktop runing the qemu instance on all night while it builds things. Plus I can quickly loop mount the original .img to check config in another window etc.

R_AL: I hit the qemu not detecting drives but I worked round it a different way, I opened up one of aureilien's prebuilt armel images, and dd'd the actual .img from my archos into it as partition one and booted that. So I *KNOW* my toolchain install is a exact representation of the archos img, because it was it. I moved the Xorg.conf away to give me some working graphics drivers because of course the chipsets are different, but that is all I really wanted to touch apart from installing the tools and increasing the size of the img to give me disk space.

Ive also downloaded the kernel source to 2.6.37-rc2 aka "Flesh-Eating Bats with Fangs" from omapedia.org, and even if its a pain to get working, it has a cool name if nothing else. Im hoping it will have all the fixes in discussed on omapedia and be applicable to the a101 gen8. Maybe even the acceleration which has filtered through to kubuntu for arm based devices. As the soc driver code is modular.

Im currently upgrading to a later version of qemu because Ive found a bug in the nbd driver in that after a reboot today it cant see the contents of the cow2 archives, but the qemu-arm will still boot them, so theyre still valid instances.

I also found some bug reports with the same issue that said goign to >0.14 fixes it so fingers crossed.

I guess there is some reason you dont want to try a apt-get install chromium-browser from a shell on the archos itself once you have the openAOS .img on there, but in case you haven't spotted them, there are armel packages compiled for the architecture already. :-

http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/chromium-browser