Odroid-U3 – ArchlinuxARM + HDMI Output

Thanks Fedex, just got my shiny Odroid-U3 delivered from Korea For those who don’t know, it’s a small developer board like the RaspberryPI (leave now if you don’t even know the RaspberryPI! ;-)) with an ARM CPU. Actually 4x 1.7GHz Samsung Exynos 4412 ARM Cortex-A9 processor, 2GByte RAM, 10/100Mbps Ethernet, 3x USB2.0 Ports and a Micro-HDMI Connector. Enough Marketing.. Let the fun begin!

The Odroid U3 comes pre-installed with an Ubuntu/Xubuntu, but that didn’t last very long. I’ve decided to put an Archlinux on it, and lucklily some guys decided to port Archlinux to the ARM-Architecture, which includes a special build for the Odroid-U3. Flashed it, booted it, and voila!
Running it, revealed two issues; first I was unable to get the X-Server running, meaning that I didn’t get any errormessage when it started, just a black-screen and nothing more. Second, there was no kernel-module for ecryptfs, to encrypt a homedir for example.

Guide for HDMI Output

As this box should ‘replace’ my workstation, I wanted to have an xserver running. I installed the fbturbo driver as follows:

sudo pacman -S xorg-server xf86-video-fbturbo-git

This is the point, where it only starts with the the black screen. The problem is that there are two framebuffer devices and of course, the default configuration was wrong.. Edit the configuration at /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-fbturbo.conf and adjust the fbdev as follows:

--- /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-fbturbo.conf.bak    2014-05-07 13:46:40.962459304 +0200
+++ /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-fbturbo.conf        2014-05-08 17:22:31.462506678 +0200
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
 Section "Device"
         Identifier      "Allwinner A10/A13 FBDEV"
         Driver          "fbturbo"
-        Option          "fbdev" "/dev/fb0"
+        Option          "fbdev" "/dev/fb1"
 
         Option          "SwapbuffersWait" "true"
 EndSection

and now restart the X-Server! This works fine for me and I no longer have any crashes, as I was used to with the preinstalled Ubuntu. The speed is fairly acceptable for normal use, but the video-playback lags quite a bit! I’ll have to check if there are other drivers than fbturbo. Well yes there are, but some parts are proprietary etc, so I’ll have to check on the alternatives there.

That’s it for the moment! I’m planning on posting another quick guide for the odroid to install an external kernel-module for disk-encryption, namely the eCryptfs.

Cheers,
Raphi