The eCAFE EX HD has an HDMI port, which enables to use an external display that is not glossy.
They ship with u-boot, and more recent u-boot versions have been maintained by the free software and open source communities.
There is also a device tree available but it needs to be upstreamed in Linux.
Once that will be upstreamed, it will be possible to use them with only free software, with u-boot and Parabola, but it will still have some serious flaws as important features like the WiFi and accelerated video decoding will still be missing.
The 3D acceleration doesn't work: The I.MX51 and I.MX53 can use the adreno driver but there is no free firmware. This creates various issues (like lightdm and sddm crashing), so the best way to deal with it is to try to remove the 'msm' driver from the kernel or disable it at runtime before starting lightdm with the following command (as root):
In Parabola I tried to add module_blacklist=msm to the kernel command line but the msm driver is builtin so it has no effect, so for now we need to do the commands above to get desktop environment working.
Source code
Some patches for Linux (including the dts) and u-boot did exist as part of meta-teapot.
Hardware documentation
UART
There is an unpopulated connector for the serial port with UART1 being written under it.
There is an arrow on the left of the connector. Here's the pinout.
> [?][TX?][][][RX][GND][GND][GND]
The MAX3232 that is nearby most probably provides the 5V voltage compatible with common USB serial port adapters.
Status:
RX works (115200 8N1 at boot => We can see u-boot logs)
TX unknown
JTAG
There is an unpopulated connector with "JTAG" being written on it. I didn't test it.
Booting
To boot you need:
To install a bootloader on a microSD, the internal eMMC, or to load it through USB
To install Parabola (or another FSDG distribution) on a (micro)SD card.
hardware information
The SD slot that is used during boot is located on the side of the laptop.
The switch to boot on the SD changes the bootorder and makes the bootrom loads the bootloader from the SD slot that is on the side. This has been verified by looking at the serial port logs. It's also documented in the recovery manual.
Installing parabola on an SD card
To install Parabola on a SD (or microSD with a microSD<->SD adapter):
Make sure that the microSD to SD card adapter/SD card switch isn't set to write protect
Install Parabola ARM on a SD/microSD as usual with only one ext4 partition
Then u-boot will boot on the SD/microsd. It will look for the following files:
/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf which must contains an extlinux configuration file
/boot/dtbs/linux-libre/mx5-mx51_na04.dtb which must contain the dtb (the location needs to be fixed to be /boot/dtbs/linux-libre/mx51_na04.dtb instead).
As for the extlinux.conf, beside adding console=ttymxc0,115200 the rest is pretty much standard and the documentation about it can be found in the Parabola ARM installation instructions on the Parabola wiki. Here's an example:
menu title Welcome to U-Boot with Extlinux support!
timeout 1
label Parabola GNU/Linux-libre, linux-libre kernel
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-linux-libre
append rootwait loglevel=8 rw console=ttymxc0,115200 root=/dev/mmcblk1p1
fdtdir /boot/dtbs/linux-libre
initrd /boot/initramfs-linux-libre.img
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