Thursday, August 7, 2008

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.

12 comments:

|miska| said...

One relevant comment. WiFi sometimes works means that we are on good way. It doesn't mean, that it is fully supported already. Even that little bit of functionality can be broken in any one of testing releases (that's why it's called testing).

I'm just afraid of post like "WiFi doesn't work for me, please help". We know, that it doesn't work well and we are working on it ;-) To be able to use it, you need some luck, working terminal and some knowlegde about wireless tools and wireless networking in linux. And even all this may be not enough ;-)

Name said...

oh YEAH !
good news :-)
im very happy to hear that developing is still active.
I have got the same problem with my clock (RTC?) like another User, after restarting to PalmOS its 1942 or so.

J-Unit said...

Oh yeah, I've had the same clock issue. And the audio goes through both the internal speaker and the headphone jack, regardless of whether the headphones are plugged in or not. But everything else that's supported works very well. Thanks!

|miska| said...

That audio switching depending on earphones will be fixed in vanilla release...

Name said...

i wish i could ascess the palm-PIM-database, calendar etc.

is this/will this be possible?

|miska| said...

With this script you can probably convert you Palm Addressbook into Opie Addressbook.

Unknown said...

Thanks a lot for your efforts Miska. Much appreciated. We'll wait for the vanilla release :-)

Unknown said...

miska: I just tried opie on my TX, WOOW! Hey man, thanks for the good work! I'm hoping to use it daily (I don't really use wi-fi much, will test it later) If you need a tester, i'd like to help.

Name said...

@Miska,
thx for this script, but how can I use it? Is there any how2 or so?

|miska| said...

Download it, set executable rights and run it with one argument - pdb
containing your Palm address book. You probably want to forward output to some
file. Result should be XML similar to that one in Opie except it will contain
all you data. So only thing left is to transfer it into your home directory in
Linux.

Name said...

Hey Miska we are waitin for the next release!

PS: no email adress found, so im posting everything as comments :D

Anonymous said...

hey,
that's cool what are you doing.
I saw a couple of screenshots at another palm poring project, there http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=131049 . I wonder whether keyboard input is handled with your port. Is it possible to enter letters and login? What else one can do with the Linux on palm? Does the image contain a compiler so one can compile software to run on it? How to connect to via network? Does bluetooth work in order to manage external devices with it? Does usb work in order to manage external devices via usb?
to copy sources do device via usb? I have no idea what can be done with Linux on Palm, and what comes to mind is to manage external devices with it.