On Sun, May 07, 2017 at 04:36:40PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
On Sun, May 7, 2017 at 4:17 PM, Pablo pablo@parobalth.org wrote:
To flash your deblobbed image beware of the closed-source flashing tool for the Chrome browser and use the strange “Ubuntu virtual machine SDK solution”. I read somewhere that one NextThing developer flashes right from his Debian box but this way is not officially supported.
jaezuss this kind of thing pisses me off. there is *NO NEED* for proprietary tools with the A13 (R8), the A20 or any other allwinner processor.
I agree. Just to be sure I looked again if I can find the source of the Chrome browser extension. I only found this forum thread where "hippiehacker" searches for the source and gets no answer: https://bbs.nextthing.co/t/chip-flasher-on-github/5561/10 So it seems I have been correct and it is proprietary.
fex-boot has been in sunxi-tools for at least FOUR YEARS since i helped hno and others with the USB-sniffing of the FEL protocol.
What I called the strange "Ubuntu virtual machine SDK solution" is documented here: https://docs.getchip.com/chip.html#installing-c-h-i-p-sdk Basically they recommend to install a huge virtual machine image to create a "level" playing field for all users and then use a bunch of shell-scripts called CHIP-tools to flash images from within the virtual machine. CHIP-tools require sunxi-tools: https://github.com/NextThingCo/CHIP-tools
So they use sunxi-tools but in a quite comlicated way. A documented and tested command-line solution for the major distributions would have been the way to go...
Pablo