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Netbook Pro I've found a working linux distro!

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Alastair Page Icon Posted 2009-08-04 6:35 PM
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I tried mounting the USB flash disk as user lx and I am told "mount: only root can do that". Also some disks report "sda: unknown partition table" via dmesg. These can't be mounted as root either.

Has anyone installed fdisk or equivalent under psionlx? If so, which package did they use?

Edited by Alastair 2009-08-04 6:36 PM
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huhwhat Page Icon Posted 2009-08-14 3:10 AM
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...so i take it that unless you are a programmer that there is no such thing as a stable, fully working, linux solution for NBP(where can add whatever linux software application one could reasonably desire)...yet!???? if so, someone please let me know (and thanks in advance) ...trying to find applications for wince4.2 is a sure waste of time...
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Alastair Page Icon Posted 2009-08-15 6:05 PM
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If you want to install Windows Mobile 2003 software on your CE.NET 4.2 Netbook Pro, try using Alpaxo's Redgear:

http://www.alpaxo.com/redgear/

At $12 the time and frustration saved is well worth the purchase price!
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Ea2
Ea2 Page Icon Posted 2009-08-17 10:59 AM
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Well, I just got my NB pro and it works great in Linux! Woohoo.

But I noticed that nobody was ever able to get a kernel compiled and running, which is a great shame. I have the sources for the 2.6.9 kernel and hope to have a go some time soon.

Has anybody got the (possibly unfinished) 2.6.17 sources that were supposedly floating around? That would be great, they aren't in the original location any more (http://linuxtogo.org/~koen/index.php) Or if they are I'm too blind to see them.

I am going to search around for a suitable and newer ready-made userland... maybe jlime or familiar or something like that. I really want to have just a web browser, abiword, gnumeric, pidgin, balsa and a c++ compiler.

Thanks,

Ed
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Ea2
Ea2 Page Icon Posted 2009-08-18 4:47 AM
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Did anyone else notice that SD cards over a certain size are not detected? At first I thought that no SD cards were detected at all, but then I tried a 32MB one and it worked. My 2GB does not work, though it is detected by CE. That means the driver doesn't support the SD extensions for larger capacities, but I don't know if it's capped at 1GB or 2GB. Pretty annoying as I just bought the 2GB card :\
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mscdex Page Icon Posted 2009-08-18 5:49 AM
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I'm pretty sure the Netbook Pro only supports regular SD (non-SDHC) cards. So that means nothing higher than 2gb (unless you count some of the non-standard >2gb SD cards that were made before the SDHC standard was finalized). Not sure though why your 2gb wasn't working.
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Ea2
Ea2 Page Icon Posted 2009-08-18 6:26 AM
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I'm not sure exactly... so far I have only looked at the wikipedia page and it seems to have some mistakes (e.g. it says that 4096 * 512 bytes = 1GB, when it should be 2GB), but essentially, they changed the SD card specification at some point so that larger capacity cards could be used (over 1 or 2 GB... not 100% certain which due to wiki page being wrong). This was before the introduction of SDHC, and was an official change by the SD association. My guess is that this is why my card wont work... the driver doesn't support these larger cards.

If I am correct, not much would need to be changed to make the driver support larger (up to 4GB) standard SD cards. I am going to try to compile and boot the kernel some time soon, if I am successful I will try to also make the required modification.

Unless anyone else has a 2GB card working in Linux on the netBook?

Also, I am trying to contact Koen to see how far he got in making the netBook Pro boot... oldman did not have any success AFAIK. I also want to know what the status of the 2.6.17 port is... I found the patches in

http://linuxtogo.org/~koen/

and also found that they are used in openembedded

http://cgit.openembedded.net/cgit.cgi/openembedded/log/?qt=grep&q=n...

However, I don't know if they will work or are finished. The power management patch is not used by oe AFAICT, so maybe it is not finished. I havent actually looked at the patches yet though.
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bobbyshane Page Icon Posted 2009-08-18 10:18 AM
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Ea2,

What device did your sd card come up as? I tried an older card and I can't find it. Which image are you using, the psionLX or GPE? When I dmesg, I can't find anything resembling anything about an sd card...
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Ea2
Ea2 Page Icon Posted 2009-08-18 12:38 PM
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Wow.

After a really long haul I finally managed to flash the GPE image onto my pro. I had to edit the nBkPro.img by hand with a hex editor after working out the correct checksums. All the information is actually in this thread or links posted here, but it was hard to figure out exactly what I was meant to checksum, at least until I properly examined mk-nBkProOsImg.c file (thanks oldman). If anyone needs the file give me a shout. In short though, you need to change the part that is currently b4 bc 62 2a to a3 1b f3 d5, and the part that is 80 05 62 43 to 63 aa 0f 2f, and of course change ee8 to 7e8. The whole file length should be 300 bytes. Also, I had to mount hda1 and run the commands from NBLXLoad.sh manually, as it didn't seem to want to run the script:

mount /dev/hda1 /rootfs
/bin/flash_eraseall -j /dev/mtd0
/bin/nanadwrite --blockalign=2 /dev/mtd0 /rootfs/gpe-image.jffs2

The GPE image sure takes a long time to load compared to the psion one (actually psion-lx one is a customised GPE as well but anyway...)

The mmc device is /dev/mmcblk0, the first partition is /dev/mmcblk0p1. For some reason fstab has /dev/mmc/blk0pt1 as well, I'd assume it's a typo, although it does beg the question how it manages to still automount it.
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Ea2
Ea2 Page Icon Posted 2009-08-19 12:09 PM
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Well, I played with gpe for a bit. I can't get my sd card to work in it either... maybe the modules are different. Maybe we should copy them over and see if that works. Also, psion-lx has some daemons running, don't know what they do, but we probably can't take those with us.

I really want a new version with new software feeds, so I have been trying to boot an angstrom image. I'm using the ipaq h5000 one, as it is built for a pxa255 processor. So far I havent had any luck - it seg faults after trying to pivot_root into the new system, presumably it is init that seg faults not pivot_root, and I'd guess that it's because of the vast difference between the initrd and the angstrom release (libc versions?), but I'm not that sure.

The plan is to get a new system up and running and modify it to work with the netbook (e.g. install correct epson x server etc). To do that I might need to create a new nBkProOs.img, which seems like a bit of a black art, so we'll see.

Ed
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RTFM
RTFM Page Icon Posted 2009-08-19 3:24 PM
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In order for Angstrom to boot you would need to build a newer 2.6 kernel to be compatible with libc. The old 2.6 kernel you are using is backward compatible with the 2.4 kernels which use an old libc (like 2.3.5). That leaves you 2 options. Build the latest 2.6 kernel and you can use Angstrom or Jlime otherwise use something older for a userland and keep the current working kernel. Older userlands like Familiar, Openzaurus, etc, or my hackjob for the jornada 720 (http://www.hostwork.com/users/matt/j720/) should work with minor modifications.

Cheers.
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Ea2
Ea2 Page Icon Posted 2009-08-20 4:00 AM
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Thanks for the info!

Would it not also be possible to build a new version of angstrom or similar with an old libc? Or build the old 2.6.9 kernel with a new libc? I hope so, or this could become much more work than I'd anticipated! :/
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Ea2
Ea2 Page Icon Posted 2009-08-20 4:19 AM
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BTW, your jornada image looks really nice. You compiled it yourself? Are there package feeds for it?

It would need the epson x server on there, but otherwise it seems ready to go. I'd also like to add a compiler.

Nice work!
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RTFM
RTFM Page Icon Posted 2009-08-20 8:59 AM
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My jornada userland was based on Familiar 0.8.2, then i smashed in some Jlime and Openzaurus packages to bring it a little more up to date. I didn't compile that, just added and edited a lot of stuff by hand. It does have a package feed but it's older (from 2005?). I did however build Jlime Mongo and Henchman using Open Embedded. It's quite a bit newer (2008), but i retired from the project about a year ago.

Cheers.
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Ea2
Ea2 Page Icon Posted 2009-08-20 9:47 AM
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Do you think familiar 0.8.4 would work? The GPE based image I have is based on 0.8.3

And what about the possibility of building a new image using old libc? That should be theoretically possible right?

Ideally I need a weekend to sit down and try to compile some stuff and figure out how to build a working nBkProOs.img

How new does the kernel need to be? Or is it just the way the kernel is built? Would the 2.6.17 version be okay? There are patches for it about but unfortunately no evidence so far that they work :/


BTW, I tried to get the MMC/SD going under the GPE image and have had no luck. I need to look into it more, but I really don't know why it isn't working. The processes I was talking about before turned out to be kernel threads, and are running in both images, so it's not that, and the modules are also the same. Maybe something in /etc, not sure.
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