Booting Mer on CuBox

So here it is CuBox very small and quite nice piece of hardware made by SolidRun. It includes for example HDMI, 2x USB, 1x eSATA, build in console with microUSB and best of all it is packaged to very nice and small casing. By default Cubox developer platform comes with sd card that has ubuntu installation on it, but when I got the device I had already decided to try to run Mer on the device.

After some time I got the device booted and posted a message in the twitter about that as well and promised an blog post about how everyone else can do the same thing as well, so here it is.

Booting Mer on cubox is relatively easy, what you need to do is to get the image (.raw.bz2 file) I made from http://sage.kapsi.fi/Mer/CuBox/20120801/ and use dd to write the image to the sd card. Guide to image writing can be found from  http://wiki.merproject.com/wiki/Nemo/Installing#Raw_Image_Write

After the image is written to the sdcard enter the sdcard to your CuBox and power it on. Currently the image has a bit limited functionality, however the following features I tested:
- Serial with microUSB
- Ethernet via RJ45 connector
- HDMI with normal fbdev driver without any hardware acceleration
- USB ports ;)

I bet many other features work as well, but for now those were the most interesting ones for me to get the device booting and to network. The image that is available on the URL above boots to full screen xterm.

I will continue working on CuBox in near future and try to get the 3D driver working on it. If you are interested of helping to get this done feel free to come to chat with me to Freenode IRC network on channels #mer and #nemomobile.