[ptxdist] X.org on mini2440

[Guillermo Rodriguez <guille.rodriguez@gmail.com>]

Dear all,

I am playing with ptxdist (2011.12.0) on a mini2440 board and wanted to test X.org on it.

After some tweaking I have managed to successfully run X, but wanted to share some issues I've found along the way.

I enabled X.org with the framebuffer driver, evdev for touchscreen input, and "void" for keyboard input. I also added the xinit package (for startx and xinit), built everything, and booted the target. I then tried startx, but got an error message saying that a cookie could not be generated.

Upon inspecting /usr/bin/startx I see that the following has leaked through:

mcookie=`/home/grodriguez/work/ptxdist/OSELAS.BSP-Pengutronix-Mini2440-2011.12.0/platform-mini2440/sysroot-host/bin/mcookie`

Not sure whether this is a bug in the configure script in the xinit package, and/or something that can be fixed in ptxdist itself.
In my case, I fixed this by manually editing the startx script and replacing the above with a pregenerated mcookie value.

Next thing was that X.org would not start if the kernel is not compiled with support for virtual terminals. While obvious in retrospect, I wonder whether it is possible for ptxdist to detect this kind of dependencies (e.g. detect that a required kernel option is not set in the current kernel configuration). While this wouldn't help when ptxdist is used to generate a rootfs only, it would certainly be useful if ptxdist is also generating the kernel for the target platform. Rebuilt and reflashed the kernel and the problem went away.

Finally I found that even when I had configured X.org to use the "void" driver for the keyboard, it would keep complaining about keymaps and keyboard initialisation until I added xkeyboard-config (presumably for /usr/lib/X11/xkb/rules/base) and xkbcomp (for the latter I had to enable the "Keyboard mappings" option in ptxdist). Not sure whether these two are actually required for all X.org installations but I could not find any other way around. If this is really a requirement perhaps these dependencies should be forced.

After this I could run X on the target device. Used fluxbox as a WM.

I can provide more information on any of the above issues if required.

Thanks and best regards,

Guillermo Rodriguez


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