Benq S6 Linux restore disc

[syskasss]

So I thought its time to give something back to the community after all that reading.
Hope someone finds it useful, took quite a bit of time to upload...

http://www.4shared.com/file/251275989/6266094c/benqs6part01.html
http://www.4shared.com/file/251361427/eb732d0/benqs6part02.html
http://www.4shared.com/file/251443501/19ec3403/benqs6part03.html
http://www.4shared.com/file/251483495/b71cc65/benqs6part04.html
http://www.4shared.com/file/252229879/57e255e1/benqs6part05.html
http://www.4shared.com/file/253103220/6b4056c8/benqs6part06.html
http://www.4shared.com/file/253982049/23dd334d/benqs6part07.html
http://www.4shared.com/file/257543151/cb1e8e05/benqs6part08.html
http://www.4shared.com/file/258509570/e5534280/benqs6part09.html

[glent2]

Great work. I happily paid my $5 to 4shared to get my hands on this a bit more quickly.

The immediate news for the hacking fraternity is that this can be made to run in VirtualBox, so some research and experimentation is possible without mucking about with your S6 (which is undoubtedly running Windows 7 by now).

I am running it now and will report what I find. The target is surely to reverse engineer enough to allow us to run a regular distro on these machines.

Let me know if you want to repeat my experiment and get stuck with VirtualBox.

[steve1974]

Thanks for the upload sky! Been looking for this for 6 months now. There was a torrent someone posted but everytime i clicked on it, it was not available. Hopefully midinux is compatible with the HUGE Ubuntu file repositiorys. Looking forward to testing this even if it isnt.

thanks again bro

steve

[steve1974]

OK i nuked win 7 that i had on here and made two 4 gig partitions. I put Xp on the first one, now will i be able to install this midinux on the second and dual boot or will i run into issues? Figured id ask before i destroy my xp install accidently lmao. Also is the 303 customer bios sufficient to run both xp and midinux so that wifi works?

[MID321]

@steve1974 - I played around a little with dual booting last week on my new blockbuster S6 (8GB SSD) - but didn't get 100% success

1. backed up xp using ghost, installed midinux - it wiped the drive and created a 1.54 GB ext3 partition (system files) and a 259 Mb FAT partition (documents, music, games folders, etc)

2. converted fat partition to fat32 and resized to 6Gb - was going to install xp to this but remebered linux writes to NTFS with no problems, so -

3. ghosted my XP install back onto the fat32 partition, which then of course became ntfs.

4. set 2nd partition active, but midinux (1st partition, non active) would boot every time

5. booted from xp cd, recovery console, ran fixmbr, then xp booted fine.

6. copied the midinux folders documents, music, games etc (which I'd backed up) to the root of C (ntfs) drive and changed the default location of xp's documents folder to midinux document folder (think you can also change location pictures and music folders in xp by editing registry but didn't get that far)

7. used bootpart (winimage.com) to add midinux partition to boot.ini

8. but selecting either midinux from nt loader menu or making the partition active, just gave a disk error, partition wouldn't boot


So that's as far as I got last week, what's up with the mbr that midinux installs?

Using grldr (or easybcd's neogrub if you didn't mind win7 loader) to directly boot vmlinuz and initrd would probably work, I'll try that next when I have some time...

Also I would prefer xp on the first partition, as you are doing, so if I ran out of space on the ntfs partition and wanted to delete midinux, it would be much simpler/faster to resize the ntfs partition.

EDIT - I wasn't thinking very coherently last week - grub was installed on the MBR (and the few sectors afterwards) - I should have added XP to grub.conf instead of nuking the mbr with fixmbr.

(btw, I did finally upload the iso to Megaupload last weekend - using that junk piece of software called Mega Manager - after 10hrs of uploading, the files went to goodness knows where - I did email megaupload support.. But it's kind of irrelevant now since syskass has kindly uploaded it anyway).

[steve1974]

Wow Mid321, i must thank ya for posting such a detailed reply. You probally saved me about a week of trouble pulling out my hair in frustration! lmao I had no idea it was such a pain getting both these OS's to dualboot. I think im gonna hold off now until i back up everything and do a little homework on grub.

I also still need to know if there's a bios that works with Both xp and midinux so that wifi is enabled and working with both OS's. It would be a waste of time if i had to reflash the bios everytime i wanted to boot between xp and midinux to get wifi working.

Another problem i can forsee is the boot menu. How are we gonna choose what OS we want loaded without an external keyboard? The home and keyboard buttons are mapped to f-9 and f-11 i believe (going from memory now) and the silver button is mapped to the Control button. The capacitive slider is simply mouse wheel up and down so i think we'd also have a problem now in the boot enviroment not being able to choose OS's without some kind of batch file to remap these buttons before the bootloader loads up.

Dont worry about that iso, i doubt anyone thought you were being mean lmao. Thankfully sky was kind enough to upload it for us all.

steve

[MID321]

@steve1974 I looked at the dual booting again and finally got it working. I put XP on the first partition this time (but it doesn't matter where you put it) and used grubloader on the xp partition (alternatives would be grub installed to mbr or to the midinux partition).

1.ghosted xp back to the entire HD

2. resized xp down to about 5.8Gb leaving 1.5Gb unallocated

3. ghosted a midinux image to the unallocated space (ghost 11.5 understands ext3)

4. downloaded GRUB4DOS zip from sourceforge.net and copied the files grldr and menu.lst to the root of C:

5. added this entry to boot.ini:

C:\grldr="Midinux"

7. edited menu.lst with ted notepad - deleted all the entries already there and pasted:

title Midinux (2.6.22.18-2)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22.18-2 ro root=LABEL=/ vga=785 splash=silent nolapic_timer udevtimeout=1
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.22.18-2.img


(this was copied from menu.lst in the /boot/grub/ folder on the midinux partition). The timeout value (a separate line near the top of menu.lst) can be changed to 0 if you want grub to instantly boot midinux.

8. rebooted and now I could choose (with the aid of a keyboard) what OS to boot.


Although I copied the folders: documents, games, etc, to the NTFS partition again, Midinux didn't see them this time - because it was looking for them at /dev/sda2 rather than /dev/sda1 ?

I don't think there's a bios wifi works with both in midinux and windows. The only bios / OS combination I haven't tried is XP with 1694. In the meantime, there's always the option of using a wifi usb adapter with one OS.

Thanks for the info on what scan codes the hardware buttons generate, I'm sure someone could mod either ntloader or grub (or some other loader) to accept these instead of the up, down and enter scan codes. Home for up, keyboard for down and motion sensor button for enter would be nice.

[syskasss]

Sorry guys it might be the case that I haven't done my homework properly on this yet. But, could anyone please advise if its possible to install win 7 on the 2gb mode (that is the one I have) or on to the SDHC card.

Many thanks


Szilard

[steve1974]

I still havent backed up my win xp yet to try this but i'll get around to it this week sometime. Thanks again for the usefull info mid321.

[steve1974]

sys, if you goto the v-lite forums there's a few scripts and dism batch files that can really strip win 7 down to its very basics. So yeah i think its possible. You'd have to heavily modify a few files so that touch pad input is left intact but it may work. Also you'd need to mount the image using dism again and really delete alot of the junk thats there.

There'a a build of win 7 floating around the torrents called 'tiny7' it runs fast on the s6 however all touch input has been ripped out so its essesntially useless for tablets.

Check there forums tho and be prepared for alot of reading!

have fun