Smartbook G138 - Stable Rom (testing)

well, tell me what you all want in a custom rom...

mr-mac: actually, this isn't harder than the DLL editing you've been doing if I prepare a kitchen and some tools for the smartbook

Edited by cmonex 2008-07-01 7:16 PM

Yeah, I am keen to learn and actually do the work for custom rom.

I will start small and just add a few apps etc.

Once happy with how to do it and first one works I will then look to see what apps everyone would like to see in a custom rom.

mmmm a Kitchen would be fantastic

John

Well spanner in the works....

My G138 just went the way of the dodo... I am hoping to track a spare battery circuit board or dead unit... It still works on A/C just the charging board went up in smoke...

John

cmonex,

If you're going to build a custom rom for the G138, I'd like the apps that you included in cmonex 2 for the mobilepro 900(c). No need to add the TextMaker fix, but the other files were useful. The PIM software and the Pocket Office suite would be very helpful. The extra browser and chat programs would be great too. I like everything you included the Addons, Tweaking and Utilities folders as well.

Thanks,
Mike

Edited by MPC720 2008-07-05 9:40 AM

Well looks like C:Amie has a battery pack with circuit board attached to I should be back with SB in a few weeks...

MPC720 :- I am not so sure cmonex is going to do a custom rom. She had been brilliant sorting the fixed rom and I think is going to do a rom to help test if compression is supported in the rom.

Hopefully after that and some help from cmonex (hopefully a rom kitchen) I will be trying a basic custom rom with a only a few changes of extra's. If there is anything you really want in an early basic custom rom pop the details in a reply.

If the basic rom works I will go on and try a larger rom with more usefull files.

John

mr-mac: Good luck with the battery pack from C:Amie. I don't need anything in the early version of your custom rom. Let us know how it goes.

Mike

well I'm quite busy lately, and the smartbook custom rom is not no.1 on the list.

so either you wait for me (which can be a few months) or don't wait but instead try to do it yourself.

however, sometime in the next few days, I will definitely put up a romkitchen like for 900c, because by default xipport crashes on some files when rebuilding a smartbook rom. the kitchen will have a base rom that has no such issues (contents fully unmodified otherwise).
you can also take the 900c romkitchen from my site (already available) and get the files for the addons registry entries etc. to put them into smartbook rom

& of course testing compression


p.s. hopefully that romkitchen will be nicely rendered obsolete with release of my romtool written by myself. sometime this summer

Edited by cmonex 2008-07-05 6:17 PM

Well, thanks to Chris, I have a new battery installed and am back using the smartbook.

Hopefully cmonex will find a few spare min to make the rom kitchen available and I will get to work on breaking a ROM (yeah I did mean breaking as opposed to making LOL).

Will keep everyone posted on the progress and hopefully pop up some beta versions. If all is good I will then go for a full custom rom.

Cheers

John

hey over there!

ohh, rom kitchen would be quite similar to 900c, similar tools, and xip'ing it to flashable image is much easier. (no multixip)

anyway, come online whenever you can, i'm sure we both can find spare minutes at the same time. =)

Nice one... Will try and get time to sort out with you next week.

Got a cheap wi-fi card for smartbook - not the one I wanted but it was as cheap as they come. a Canon Prism 3 card for £4 delivered off the bay. Will get a better card at some point as I either want the Sandisk with 128Mb built in or the "Socket P500 Go" but cheap is good for the moment and should work with inbuilt drivers.

Looking forward to getting going with rom changes should make the smartbook very usefull indeed.

Will have to look and see if I can get the latest version of Opera or NetFront to run on the smartbook as well - IE is ser quick so I would hope Opera (known to be quicker) will put SB right up with lower end desktops in terms of browsing speed. It is almost up to that speed with IE so should be good.

cmonex: if possible could I also get a list of all dll's you added to 900c rom so I can try and make it work as well as the 900c for running ppc/wm software.

John

Was wondering how to do a vid of the smartbook in action... And realised my phone does video (and fairly good quality) so does the other halfs camera).

Just sorting out some software on Sig. Flash 7 is installed and so is a java plugin (played a java game online last night and although a little slow it ran perfectly with sound and everything).

Re altered the drivers for my billionton BT card (which works great on CE4.2)

Will maybe try and get opera to work on it before the video but not essential.

Not sure what else would be good to demo the smartbook? Anyone think of any nice looking games that will run on a 800x480 screen? If yes please shout and I will install and include in the vid.

I guess a good few of you will be intrested to see one in action as a lot has been said about them but don't think I have ever seen a video of one anywhere showing off it's speed.

Anyway better do some work today.

John



Edited by mr-mac 2008-09-26 8:39 AM

yes opera is even faster than IE, i have it there.

dlls: just see the 900c rom kitchen. but about the improved dlls that are inserted as modules (coredll, commctrl, aygshell), you might need a little help there, as it is not trivial (until my rom editor program is done ), we'll sort this on irc

video would be cool!

Well a small update.

I got a wi-fi card for Smartbook (one of those generic looking canon ones on ebay - prism3 CF2 (CF2 is good in smartbook as it fills whole slot and means it is solid and not flexing about).

Anyway at first I couldn't get any prism drivers to work so used the card with the inbuilt driver (on C:Amie's advice - so not sure if this applies to all prism cards or just some of them). Stability issues had returned (not all of them - the ones original rom fixed are still away). Every so often I had to hard reset the smartbook and once it just crashed while using RDP and again needed a hard re-set.

Wondered about wi-fi driver and speaking to cmonex she mentioned she had the same problems with inbuilt driver. So thought I would try again and see if I could get a std prismnds.dll to work.

For some reason I am getting prismnds.dll to work now this seems to be a good improvement over the original;

1. You now get to use Wireless Zero config (so you can set up diffrent encryption for diffrent AP's)

2. It seems to be a little faster

3. If I turned unit off with wi-fi card in place it didn't always start up if I turned it on whith card still in (new driver handles this fine).

4. Not had a hard re-set crash since I have been using prismnds.dll

So all round I have to recommend SB users with prism cards look at using prismnds.dll rather than driver that comes with smartbook.

My next usefull discovery was to check if a small tweak I used in some other devices was any good on smartbook. The tweak involves MaxConnectionsToServer entry in the registry. IIRC the default in CE 4 is probablly 2 so I added the registry entry and set it to 10. Following this I re-tested a few websites (after emptying cache).

All pages are loading faster some pages (say gallery type ones on some of the stock image sites etc.) were greatly improved (I am talking a massive improvement in complete page load speeds). It seemed to leave the unit more responsive while pages were loading as well. So it seems the already superquick browsing speed of the Smartbook is suffering a noticeable bottleneck where rather than the CPU being the limiting factor the CPU was actually being held up waiting on data.

Wi-fi over the CF seems fast compared to Sig3. IIRC the Sig3 showed a max download speed of about 80kb/s (or was it 40) limited by the slow CF slot. The smartbook has shown a download speed of 700Kb/s on 10/100 and so far (before the new faster driver) I have seen 350kb/s download speeds from 802.11b.

In response to the speed shown in my video the web over wi-fi with a good signal feels just a nippy as it does over 10/100 so will not be revising my opinion of the slow browsing speed the razorbook (linux or CE) have shown.

Will keep posted with rom progress. As soon as kitchen is ready I will likely try a few basic things like stripping out inbuilt wi-fi driver and adding the registry speed tweaks (will post full details of tweak later).

Later

John

Edited by mr-mac 2008-10-24 11:48 AM

this is great news - confirms my suspicions about the crappy built-in driver.

Yeah. Not sure if it is partly driver or partly cos it's in the rom so if it freezes trying to read or use the file it damages it on the soft re-set? Can't see how but the other crash issue was becuase the rom area of the ram was damaged when a program tried to write to it and the issue looks identical when driver takes it down.

Not sure will likely try prismnds in a custom rom but it may be better to keep the driver in ram. Will try it and see.