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.