XADADA

base guide

Talk less, work more:

• You’ve got your own ibis

• It needs to be fed, cleaned and trained

• ibis - is a smart bird, and can teach a lot of things…

You’ve got a tablet on Allwinner A10/A13/A20 chipset, and how did you get it… well, let’s skip it for a while 8) Mostly possibly, that mentioned tablet is just lying somewhere on your shelf, harvesting a dust on its body. But this tablet could work pretty fine, if it would get a new conciousness… Well, that will be the point of our ongoing conversation.

Let’s assume, that you’ve got Allwinner A20, with 10" 1024x600 display, 1 Gb of RAM, and don’t-know-how-much-NAND-there, at least 1 USB port, a uSD card slot and pre-installed ancient Android. Probably, you could also have a OTG-cable for the tablet, additional power source, and optionally USB-mouse… You run Linux on your workstation, and you also know how to use Linux. You’ve got a free uSD card, 4 Gb or more. You’re absolutely sure that you’re okay with the slogan “It is better to loose a day, but get to destination for 5 minutes”

1. Let’s assume that you’re absolutely sure about what you are doing, why and what for. I.e. - no claims are accepted, unless the justification of a claim provided. Let’s make sure that we are using appropriate instruments, like a surgeon before the operation. Let’s have a quick test on our patient (tablet), examine its heart (i.e. - the battery is fully charged, and a green trash-can is turning around while the power button is pressed)

2. Download image: # wget "http://xadada.01.gg/dl.sh?content/downloads/AXX.XADADA.2016-05-13.img.bz2" -O AXX.XADADA.2016-05-13.img.bz2

3. test that image was downloaded correctly: # md5sum AXX.XADADA.2016-05-13.img.bz2 c2122d38b968fedd94054de35cdb945d AXX.XADADA.2016-05-13.img.bz2

4. insert uSD-card into card-reader, insert card-reader into the appropriate h0le on the tablet’s body, and make some magic passes over the console:
   # bunzip2 -dc AXX.XADADA.2016-05-13.img.bz2 | dd bs=4M of=/dev/sdX where /dev/sdX - your uSD “pumpkin seed”, and you absolutely sure about its system name, and that it is it, absolutely sure about it.

5. Upon completion of writing image on a uSD-card - let’s sync a file system and unmount uSD-card from the card-reader - NOW YOU CAN! ~>8-В

6. Insert uSD-card into totally-turned-off-device, press the power button, pray, make a cross, make a star, cross fingers, make scary faces, make some unpronounceable noise while wating, and see on the screen some happy error messages from kernel.

In case your device have other configuration, or the device itself made from other components, with different parameters, - in that case it is requred to make some hand-made job: fine-tune the content of the uSD-card, according to your requirements.

We will need for that: - detect the processor type, installed on your device, - detect other devices.

On Allwinner system-on-chip family, there is a script.bin file, which you can get it directly from your device by means of ADB:

adb shell mkdir /mnt/nanda
adb shell mount /dev/block/nanda /mnt/nanda
adb pull /mnt/nanda/script.bin /media/SD/
adb shell umount /mnt/nanda
adb shell rmdir /mnt/nanda

If you manage to get that file - 50% of the process is done. That file needs to be copied on the first partition of uSD-card (in VFAT format), and copy suitable platform kernel into uImage.

• Bootable partition of XADADA uSD initially contains:

Kernels for 3 platforms:

[2016-05-09]-[22-36]..uImage..3.0.sun4i
[2016-05-11]-[03-13]..uImage..3.0.sun5i
[2016-05-13]-[16-00]..uImage..3.4.sun7i

File script.bin:

script.bin

Set of script-bins from various devices:

scripts/

u-boot for 3 platforms:

u-boot/

File boot settings:

uEnv.txt

Current bootable kernel:

uImage

wifi-connection settings:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 264 Mar 18 19:30 wpa_supplicant.conf

We need to upload custom u-boot according to the selected platform, for that there are several scripts for each platform available. Find and open dd.sh script to obtain additional information how to use it.

./u-boot/A10:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 137 May 13 18:09 dd.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 258860 May 10 17:20 u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin

./u-boot/A13:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 137 May 13 20:42 dd.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 260468 May 10 17:47 u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin

./u-boot/A20:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 146 May 13 21:37 dd.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 258880 Mar 10 2015 u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin

• Modify dd.sh in the selected folder, upload u-boot, replace scrip.bin on ours - that’s all for A13 and A20 devices, the tablet can be started now.

• In case you have A10, then additional steps are required to perform on kernel modules:

  • mount uSD: mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt/sdX2
  • switch to the folder with kernel modules: /mnt/sdX2/usr/lib/modules
  • and make “abracadabra”: # rm -rf 3.0.101+ ; cp -r A10.3.0.101+ 3.0.101+

• Now… change wpa_supplicant.conf - add your own WiFi networks…

- Was everything made correctly? Then NOW YOU CAN ~>8-D

Oh, yes!

Do not forget to change the passwords!

Default credentials are:

• root:root

• shaman:xadada

2016-05-13 22-33