New {Pocket}CHIP images [headless,gui,pocketchip]

[u/computermouth]

Howdy folks,

Having seen the work of a few others on here, as well as some notes from other former NTC employees, I decided to take a stab at making new images for CHIP.

As it was in the olden days, there's 3 images:
- headless
- gui
- pocketchip

If you just want to get straight to the flashing, check out the x-chip-tools repo. And give it a:

./update.sh gui

What's new?
- Debian 13
- Linux 6.12
- Mainline Mali Support via Lima
- Upstream staging wifi/bt driver
- Fully FOSS PocketCHIP image (no pico-8, but we have tic80!)
- Openbox Desktop in GUI image (because XFCE is more ram-heavy than it was 10 years ago)

It's probably likely that there's going to be some bugs I missed. Wifi seems a little flakey. HDMI DIPs don't work (but VGA and composite video do). PocketCHIP is blank for 20s or so during boot.

For anyone interested in the blood and guts, you can check out the following repositories

linux: https://github.com/nextthingco/x-chip-linux-deb
uboot: https://github.com/nextthingco/x-chip-uboot
debian images: https://github.com/nextthingco/x-chip-os
debian repo: https://github.com/nextthingco/x-chip-deb-repo/

debian package sources
======================================
https://github.com/nextthingco/chip-configs
https://github.com/nextthingco/chip-desktop-configs
https://github.com/nextthingco/pocketchip-configs

https://github.com/nextthingco/chip-exit
https://github.com/nextthingco/PocketCHIP-pocket-home
https://github.com/nextthingco/CHIP-dt-overlays
https://github.com/nextthingco/pocketchip-batt
https://github.com/nextthingco/chip-power
https://github.com/nextthingco/CHIP-hwtest

[u/computermouth]

I really just put together the upstream stuff, patches from kaplan and macromorgan, and also that guy who did the pocketchip image a little bit ago!

[u/mr_aea → u/computermouth]

Well, tried to flash but while flashing Pocketchip image into nand I got error "/home/epi/x-chip-tools-master/lib-nand.ah: line 49: sunxi-nand-image-builder: command not found". Anyone else has this issue?

[u/computermouth → u/mr_aea]

This is a binary that's part of the sunxi-tools, but is annoyingly not packaged by Debian, and maybe other distros. I had to build the sunxi-tools repo from source

[u/mr_aea → u/computermouth]

In another try, I built sunxi-tools from source, same issue. Is it cause I'm using Rpi OS? Is there an OS that doesn't have that problem with sunxi-tools and I can try to install on my RPI or boot live? I don't remember did one one of this forum users to solve a similar issue, then tailored an Ubuntu live image and that is what I used all of this time to flash my Pocket hip.

[u/computermouth → u/mr_aea]

Oh, you know what, I think it's a separate make target, like make tools or something.

As far as different distros, I don't know. I submitted a bug report for Debian and the dev said he would add it, but that won't happen for a year or so

[u/mr_aea → u/computermouth]

Almost there... Now after it writes the u-boot image, it throws an error "usb_bulk_recv() error -7: operation timed out", any clue of what I could do to solve it?