I have found a low priced ($47 qty. 1) ARM-A9 Dual Core 1GHz Thin Client board that currently has an Embedded Linux OS along with an RDP 7.1 client. There is an SD slot used to upgrade this board with different firmware. Is the process for jumpstarting this type of board generic based upon ARM chip? The manufacturer says that they are ok with my installing a different Thin Client program than RDP, but due to the small nature of the quantity I would be buying, they aren't particularly interested in helping with the project.
First, does anyone know a different, commercial ARM product in this price range with 3 USB, audio/mike, HDMI, VGA, Ethernet, 512M RAM, 512M Flash, SD slot etc.? If so, is it programmable to allow new programs to be written to its flash memory?
If a different board is not comparable by price and features, is it possible to experiment with different ways to boot the device using uboot or some other tool? I'm a complete beginner with ARM, so if the questions have inconsistencies or exhibit a lack of knowledge, please forgive... The basic goal is to add a different Thin Client (Cendio's ThinLinc) instead of RDP. I'm comfortable as a programmer, but I've never before tackled anything embedded like this. The company that makes these boards is Chinese, and there is a huge communication barrier in speaking with their technicians, so I'm hoping that the ARM development community can shed light on this as to whether I need to give up, or whether jumpstarting these boards and reprogramming them is a reasonable proposition
Thanks,
Bill_VH
It's good to hear your progress; even though you haven't succeeded yet, I am sure you'll get there!
Normally, such devices boot from the SD-card/MicroSD-card by default.
You will need to familiarize yourself with the boot process and how to configure the particular Linux image you've downloaded.
I do not know much about it, but I can say that most of the ready-made images can be modified from a PC (preferrably running Linux already), by editing configuration files in /boot.
-But it's not just editing a text-file, because when the system boots, it often loads binary files only (some of the configuration files are kept as text).
So normally, you would have to ...
On Cubian (debian variant), the binary file I had to work with was called /boot/script.bin
So first thing to do is to back it up...
cp /boot/script.bin /boot/script.bck
Then you need to convert it to a text-file...
bin2fex /boot/script.bin /boot/script.fex
Edit the file...
nano /boot/script.fex
-After saving the file, convert the new .fex file back to binary:
fex2bin /boot/script.fex /boot/script.bin
and then boot on the new conf.
I wish I could give you more details and better help. As I am not a Linux expert, I will recommend a specific ARM-Linux forum for better information, because from here on, I would only be "guessing and hoping".