Grindars brave NAND testing

Lately there were no news about TX. I was playing mostly with OpenEmbedded, preparing some packages and so long, but there were someone else playing with TX. As title states Grindars was playing with NAND driver. I admit I wasn't brave enough to test writing something in NAND. But he was, he erased all his NAND in linux, created jffs2 and store some files on it. That's great, don't you think? So NAND driver works! Other interesting part was return to PalmOS. He was able to boot up PalmOS after his experiments again. It wasn't perfect thou. It lacked WiFi and bundled media files. But after restoring files from backup, his WiFi works again! It doesn't survive hardreset and it needs another restore after each hardreset, but it's great that his Palm is working even with some issues, don't you think? Maybe some other issues arise over the time, but I wanted to let you know about this and if you are interested in details, here is a thread on hackndev main site: http://hackndev.com/node/225

General news

Well, some of you were asking some questions so I'm going to publish new blog entry with several news.

Ohloh Journaling

I've started to use ohloh journaling. So more current informations can be found there, but I'll continue to post on my blog and I'll summarize all my relevant ohloh journaling entries, so you can just follow my blog. But if you are impatient, you can use ohloh journals ;-)

SDHC

One frequently asked question is about SDHC support. We have tested snua's SDHC in my Palm TX. As it is not supported by PalmOS, I had to boot Linux from normal card, but with running Linux I have been able to use SDHC card, so it seems like Linux can be solution if you want to use bigger cards ;-)

Releases

People keep asking me about new releases. Because of that, I've decided not only to prepare testing kernels but to prepare testing images as well. Both of them can be found at my testing page. Conditions are same as in the case of testing kernels. It's just compiled code. Testing images can be completely untested and completely not working. But again, if you are impatient, here is your chance ;-)

Palm TX with vanilla flavour

Maybe you already noticed that in past few months our main target in Hacking and Development was to get our palms upstream. Marex finished submitting patches for TX first, so you can look forward to 2.6.27. Currently, there is still too much things left for vanilla to be ready for dailly use. We are working on them currently. You can check latest build of TX vanilla kernel on my testing page. It should somehow work with older opie images. But I'm currently working on new images ;-)

What doesn't work is backlight applet (which is fixed in current opie already), sound settings are quite different now and little bit more complicated (gui currently doesn't work), buttons mostly doesn't work with opie and some other stuff like suspend.

So why even try it? From my personal experience, it works with more problematic cards. I have one card which sometimes works, sometimes reports a lot of IO errors. With vanilla it wors without problem.

WiFi

And the most interesting thing about vanilla. WiFi. I wish I could tell it works. Curently, we can say, that it partially works. You need to turn it on in PalmOS. And not only turn it on, you have to do something with it, like scanning for networks, so PalmOS initialize it. Then after booting to Linux, WiFi will be recognized as eth0. Scanning for networks doesn't work. Some other settings are broken as well. But some people reported that they managed to get AdHoc network working, so you can try, but don't expect so much. Once I'll have some step by step howto, I'll post it here ;-)

Just one final note - WiFi related thread on Hacking and Development.

New release - 20080505

First of all, I'm sorry to keep you waiting for so long. During the weekend both my notebook and desktop died unexpectedly, so I had no computer. I get my desktop working somehow during the Monday but I had to fix a lot of things and now it's fully functional. That was my excuse for not keeping my promise about date of the next release. And now, the most important part - new release.

What's new?

This release has much more applications then the older one. Well, but it's missing Konqueror embedded. I had some problems to compile it, I'll try it again, but it's missing for now.

Sound

A lot of people was asking how to turn sound on. It's easy, you just adjust volume in mixer. To make it even easier, current release has by default volume set to max. So you don't have to ask how to turn it on. Other sound related news is that volume applet in Opie is "fixed", so you can adjust volume much easier.

New icons

A lot of applications has a new, much nicer icons. That's because of the hard work of z72ka. He prepared this icons for you and he helped me a lot with building release. So great thanks to him.

Bugs

This release is basically release from LinuxExpo with several bugs fixed and some little adjustments. There is still some bugs left as everywhere. One thing is missing Konqueror embedded as I already mentioned. Other already known bug is some mistake in russian localization. I'll try to take a look at both these errors and try to fix them, but it will take a lot of time and I'm quite busy with school right now...

Download

Maybe I should mention where to get it too. You can get it as always on my webpages. Last note, there should be some surprise for you, so pay attention during the first boot ;-)

LinuxExpo 2008 - results

LinuxExpo (see my previous post) ended last week, so I want to inform you about our participation. We presented there our Linux powered Palms. And a lot of people were interested. It was a small exhibition, but we spoke nearly all the time with some visitors. And we even installed Linux on several Palms of our visitors. Well, it was fun and I think that it was quite success. Maybe more interesting can be, that because of this I prepared new rootfs, but it's still testing. I know about several bugs which I want to repair before releasing it as a stable. But you can get something on the testing part of my webpages.

Last note - we even convinced Tux to try Palm with Linux ;-) Photo by root.cz

LinuxExpo 2008

Well, I didn't published any news for a long time, so I want to fix this. I'm not good in reading comments and replying to them. So I want to apologize to all of you. But here comes opportunity to meet some of the developers face to face. During the next week (15.-16.), there will be LinuxExpo exhibition in Prague. They say that it is the biggest OpenSource exhibition in central Europe. In the fact, it's really small exhibition. But if you happen to be in Prague, you can meet some of us there. We will be presenting some Palms with Linux of course ;-) And last note, if you register in advance, it's free ;-)

Dropped T5

As you maybe already noticed on Hacking & Development main site. Marex dropped Palm T|T5. He pushed sources into handhelds.org. That is probably good for T5 users. Once handhelds get propagated into vanilla it would be great. But I think, there is still some work left on T5.

When you read that T5 has been dropped, you probably worried about releases. So I just want to let you know, that I still consider Palm T|T5 as a part of Hacking & Development project and will be preparing releases for T5 in cooperation with snua. These releases will be based on Hacking & Development kernel, but I don't think that this actually matters.

Let's revive!

I had no time to keep my blog up to date lately. But there wasn't so much news in the project. What's new? Marex wrote MTD driver, so we can access NAND memory in Palm. Marex tried reading and it worked. Writing should work too, but nobody was brave enough to try it. Nobody knows, what will happen. There are two possible endings. It can end up with dead Palm or with hardreset. Possibility of bricking device isn't much tempting... Other thing is, that we don't have NVFS driver yet. So we can't mount memory from PalmOS :-(

But I've got some good news after all. I finally managed to update stable releases. This is interesting mainly for Palm T|T5 users. You can get them as usual at my homepage

Last piece of information is that we've managed to setup OpenEmbedded compilation machine (together with SleepWalker) and we are experimenting with building new images. So maybe I'll have some new images in near future ;-)