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 ;-)

Marex and TX

As I promised several times, Marex is going to have my TX for development. I'm sending it tomorrow. Once he get it, we can expect some results very soon ;-) I hope at least in working PCMCIA driver. With some luck, we can hope in WiFi too. So good luck, Marex ;-)

TX LCD border

I was searching how to disable LCD white border. It can be really annoying sometimes. I tried Marexs driver for LD, but I couldn't find proper GPIOs. But I've tried something else too. I've tried to change dimensions of the display. And it worked. So now I have Opie running in 324x484 resolution. With no white border. White border was the main reason to try it, but if we've got 324x484 display, why don't we use these additional pixels instead of just blanking them? ;-)

You can count them ;-) If you want to try it by yourself, you can try extremely testing release ;-)

Extremly testing releases

If you are interested in my really experimental releases, you can get them on testing part of my pages. I'm uploading there something before I test it. If it works, then I move it on my official pages where you can get it in usual way. This can be interesting for T5 users. I don't have T5, so releases on my pages are based on snua's testing. Because of this, experimental builds can be much newer then normal ones. But off course, there is high probability that nobody ever tested them.

New TX release

Palm TX linux rootfs was quite old and it didn't support new features. So I tried Marex's Technology Preview. With Marex's cooperation, I modified it to work on TX too and updated it with new Opie features (mostly did by Marex). So what's new in this rootfs?

• Opie 1.2.3 + some features that will be in 1.2.4


• Bluez 3.12 to support bcm2035 natively


• Whole image is compiled with iWMMXt optimization which means using full power of PXA27x


• Fully functional Bluetooth and Irda applets.


• Konqueror Embeded web browser.


• CPUFreq applet to control speed of your CPU (you can overclock your Palm from GUI, isn't it cool?)


• Other nice Opie improvements.

You can get it as usual on my web site

TX News - Cpufreq

So Marex didn't come :-( Maybe next week. So we have to wait for WiFi little bit longer. But Marex repaired cpufreq, so we can try it instead ;-) I've tested it already and it works. You can find it in updated kernel from my pages (hosting is down at the moment, but I hope it will be up soon). You can set speed by

echo freq > /sys/devices/system/cpu/spi0/cpufreq/scaling_setspeed

and you can get your current frequency by

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/spi0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq.

PS: If you used my previous package, you don't need to update everything, but you can just download kernel package and unpack it on your card (overwriting all existing files).

Palm TX PCMCIA status

We've done some tests with Marex lately (he told me what to do and I tried it on real device) and maybe we've got some results. What it is looks like at the moment? It seems, that PalmTX WiFi is connected to PCMCIA at address 0x28000000. There is also another used PCMCIA - 0x20000000. Marex thinks that it can be NAND memory. So it sounds very promising. Unfortunately we don't have proper PCMCIA driver for TX yet :-( Maybe we are still missing some GPIOs (we tried some promising ones but with no results). Great news at last, Marex is coming to Prague (Thursday this week) to see my TX, so PCMCIA driver can be ready soon ;-) These are just some notes, but as you can see work is in progress ;-)

dump of 0x20000000

00005a00
00000000
c0000000
c0000000
30318f57
00000000
000c000c
00040004
00000005
ffff0000
c0011e90
c0005f6c
ffff0014


Image selector, part 2 ;-)

I did it. When no one believed in my developing skills... Ok, that was for fun, now let's talk about something more serious. As I mentioned before (in my previous post), I was thinking about writing interactive image selector purely in shell. So job done ;-) Many thanks to kEdAR who prepared busybox for me (I needed some usual shell utilities which wasn't included in my old ramdisk). So how does my image selector work? After loading ramdisk and configuration file from SD/MMC Card, it shows you what configurations you can choose from. Also it marks one of them as selected one (first configuration from your list). If you press enter, it will choose next one. When any configuration became marked as selected, you've got several seconds to change your mind. If you don't press enter during that period, selected image will be loaded.You can specify different SQUASROOT and ROOT for each of your choices. I hope it will be enough.

I nearly forgotten to mention where you can get it. As usual, you can get it from my pages (it's in squashfs-lzma now) and you can also get there documented example of configuration file. And last thing to add, screenshot ;-) It's taken on PC, but it looks same on Palm ;-)

Image selector

Basic idea

I was thinking, with squashfs-lzma, I can have several rootfs on my card and with my ramdisk, I can eassily switch between them by simply editing configuration file. But it can be even more simple. What about bootup menu which let you decide, what rootfs image you want to boot? Well, it can be implemented in PalmOS so it just modify your configuration file, but why? I like to have as simple bootloader as it can be. I prefer solving this issue in Linux. So we can write C program, compile it and use it. But it's not cool ;-) Everybody can do that and you have to take care about libraries and such. So why don't write it in shell? :-D Yes, this sounds cool. Couse Palm doesn't have keyboard. We've got only few keys - some of them are FX and then we've got Dpad. So I've decided to write rootfs selector, which can be controlled by single key :-D I'll use just enter. Main idea is to wait X seconds (where X is user definable) and then run current image. By using enter key, you can switch between several rootfs.

Implementation

How to implement something like this in shell? We need several processes and we need them to communicate with each other somehow. We need one process to wait for enter key and another process to wait and count seconds. So I divided it into 3 different files. First of them is main. It looks simple:

#!/bin/sh

mkdir /tmp/chooser.$$
sh ./dialog 5 /tmp/chooser.$$ 2> /dev/null
. /tmp/chooser.$$/action
rm -r /tmp/chooser

echo $NUM

It's just a simple example. It just runs dialog with 5 seconds of timeout and after that it read's up, what it should do and do it ;-) Now let's take a look at dialog script.

#!/bin/sh

[ "$1" ] && TIME=$1
[ "$2" ] && WDIR=$2
[ "$NUM" ] || NUM=1

echo NUM=$NUM > $WDIR/action
sh ./timedkill $TIME $WDIR $$ &
read tmp
echo switched
NUM=`expr $NUM + 1`
kill `cat $WDIR/killing`
. ./dialog

Here comes my main idea. We call somebody and tell him, what is our PID. That somebody waits X seconds and then kill us. But if user press enter, we will be faster and kill him first. All the time, we are storing current selection, so when we died, our parent would know, how far we get and can run selected operation. Last script is easy, timedkill just wait and then kill ;-)

#!/bin/sh

echo $$ > $2/killing
sleep $1
kill $3
echo action

Conclusion

You can say, I'm mad. You can say that I totaly lost my mind. But I think that in cases like this, the power of shell shows itself. Isn't it really pretty? We can do nearly everything in shell. That's why I like UNIX. Shell RULEZ!

PS: I'll add some graphics and configuration files to it and I'll include it in my future initramdisk ;-) Currently tested only on real computer, but I'll try it on Palm too ;-)

T5, TX release and my ramdisk

Releases

Because of lack of up to date releases, I decided some time ago to put together something, so even normal users can test latest kernel and rootfs images. I made modular ramdisk (I'll tell you more about it in next section) and I was thinking about how to put release together. I've decided to try squashfs-lzma. I think that it could be useful once somebody figures out how to store rootfs in NAND memory. Because UnionFS was somehow broken in kernel at that moment, I patched kernel with aufs patch and repaired some trivial errors in it. So my releases are using squashfs-lzma and aufs. I didn't compile it all by myself, but I used z72kas root filesystem and just converted it into squasfs-lzma. I prepared TX kernel and modules and in cooperation with snua12, we put together kernel and modules for T5. If you are interested, you can get it on on my web. Main advantage is that in never releases, you can update just kernel or just rootfilesystem and you don§t need to overwrite everything you had ;-)

Initramdisk

What is new in my initramdisk? Why did I need something special? As I already said before, I wanted to try squashfs-lzma. So I needed support for mounting aufs. Also I wanted /home to be in separate file so I wouldn't lost all my data when I use different rootfs. So I needed ramdisk with possibility to mount several different files and I wanted ramdisk, which can be easily configurable by using external text file stored on SD/MMC card. So I wrote it up. I also prepared some user-definable functions which are called during boot process, so you can use them, if you are missing something ;-) I've got good experience with them. I've downloaded some image some time ago and I couldn't boot it. But I was able to find out why and even repair it by using just text editor in PalmOS and user-definable functions in my ramdisk. So it's very useful ;-) If you are interested, you can get it on on my web. You can also find there well documented example of configuration.

Hello World

So here comes another blog devoted to Hacking & Developement. It's project to port Linux on Palm PDAs. As I mentioned in description of this blog, I've got Palm TX. So let's start with current status of Palm TX. Don't get me wrong, I'm mostly just a observer so thanks goes to the smart developers from Hacking & Development

What currently works on TX?

• Linux boots.
• USB works (usb network can be established).
• Power Management works (TX can be suspended and waked up).
• Infraport works.
• Bluetooth works.

What currently doesn't work on TX?

• WiFi (work in progress).
• Access to NVFS memory (some ideas already in Marexs mind).

I'll keep you posted about any news ;-)