MP790 *nix, other H/PC Experience also welcome...

Suspend, eh? Interesting, I may have to give this a whirl when I get home today

What version are you running?

2.0.2 Binary Release - hpcmips

Forewarning, back that HPC up before doing this, and prepare for some hard resets.

I think I reset mine like 5 times today trying to get BSD to install all the way. I think I need a bigger CF, and some fdisk knowledge. Best part is that you can't possibly permanently kill anything. Man I love ROM.

Yes, it appears suspend is built into the kernel. I could be wrong, but I push the power button and all the lights, lcd, and everything goes off. I hit that button again, and it comes back to life. (It also initiates the hpcapm suspend command, hehe).

I must say, console is so inviting... I need to get a base system running before I can justify buying that 2.2gb microdrive or 1gb CF...

Snappy! has said though that he got Dillo and X running so it must be doable!

Oh, if you get any further than I did please share how you got it to work!

Also, does anyone know if we somehow got X running and everything configured at the base level (Matchbox, Browser, Power Mgmt) if we could somehow make an image of the OS and make it easy for others to use? If so, it'd be great to put on the site (its all GPL stuff anyways).

I certainly will!

I'm far from a linux guru but I seem to have a knack for getting things to work, so we'll see how it goes. I won't be home for another 2 or 3 hours, unfortanately (off work in an hour and 10 and then I have to 'go shopping' with the gf) but when I do finally get home and find my Damn Small Linux CD I'll give 'er a whirl.


Edit: Oh man this backup is going to take forever!

Also, am I correct in assuming that the internal flash rom is safe regardless of what I do with netbsd?

Edited by corporate 2005-08-11 6:56 PM

What do you think I have been doing for Debian? Have you heard anything I said?

Take everything, and turn it into a gzipped-tarball! (Level 9). That will compress the entire filesystem to 1/3 the size (usually), and you can just send that around.

Shush! What, do you think you know what you're doing!


Kidding, kidding (please don't hurt me!). That's a great idea.. This all seems very realistic all of a sudden (I was just in the dark, I suppose) - and it would be great to get it all down to something like an autoinstaller that formats the card for you and everything.... hmm, ideas..

oh it would be really nice of you to share the working image (with a decent gui of course ) ... ! especially as i know nothing about these things.. yet

My sentiments exactly. If we can get everything into a nice and easy package for everyone, it'd be the perfect CE replacement for the 780/790 series which seems to be picking up user-base everyday because of the new price point.

What we need (probably leaving some things out but hey, its a draft):

- Mail Client
- Chat Client
- Browser
- Text Editor
- Image Viewer
- Small/Lightweight Window Manager and X Server
- Music Player
- Decent Power Management (Screen brightness control, battery monitor, suspend etc.) [So far... not much I think we'd have to do. Wouldn't know until X was running though. hpcapm is decent!]
- Filemanager

I personally would also like FTP, a WYSIWYG/Code editor (tinyKate or something with syntax highlighting...) but that isn't a must have.



Things I think would be perfect:

- Matchbox (50kb!) w/ Tiny-X: This is the same window manager used in GPE as well as other 'palmtop' distros. It's very lightweight and minimizes screen usage so you get the most out of your 640x240.

- Embedded Konqueror: I know this isn't the same lightweight of Dillo, but its full fledged browser. However, I am not sure if this will run under BSD. Dillo might be all we have for now.


Now if you could roll all that up into a nice 512-1gb flash distro.. oh that would be nice. The biggest problem will be that we'll probably have to build all this stuff from source. There most likely aren't very many binaries for hpcmips. Cross compiling would be a must and I have no clue how you do that.

A big list, but it seems very realistic!

I'm not much of a use for coding, not for *nix anything really.. but I have played with both for years (I'm only 20, give me a break here) and I've got that thirst to learn

Cross compiling shouldn't be too much of an issue as (AFAIK) you can select the desired platform at time of compiliation.. sorta. Or we could just get gcc and the like running on the 790 itself and do all our compilation in-house. I imagine it would be rather slow, but it should work



More when I get home, I think I'm going to get right to this.


A thing that I would HAVE to add to your list - we need a decent PIM.. something that would sync nicely with a desktop machine. I'm all about the syncing, though if this thing becomes a full-fledged computer I suppose there isn't much of a need for it!

Joined the hpcmips mailinglist, noticed some posts by Snappy!

One person posted a link to precompiled MP780 packages for 1.6.2:
http://web.umr.edu/~erprz9/packages/

I've got my CF still with a 5mb FAT16 partition for the install stuff (netbsd.gz and pbsdboot.exe) and I get all the way through the FTP fetch... and wham, stuck at the install progress bar again! I even told it to install to the correct partition and everything... I have no idea what I'm doing, only that its wrong. Sheesh.

hehe ... then you will find some of my silly questions there too!

btw, try downloading the files using your *PC* and then copy them to your fat16 partn. The downloads will take up around 16MB~20MB ... and when fully untarred during install, will be around 150+mb or so (as I recall) ... that is not taking into the various desktop ipkgs if you want a more decent environment than a "# " command prompt!

Finally home!


Welp, the goal for today is to get a working console up and running. I've got.. 1 hour and 47 minutes, I think that's plenty of time to get linux up and running on my pc (thank goodness for vmware and damn small linux) and netbsd up and running on my hpc.



I shall take pictures for entertainment porpoises.

Welp, I got nowhere. I ran the backup on my HPC, got it all ready - only to find out my dirt cheap no name brand CF reader has gone kaput... So, it'll be a week until a new one comes in from the magical land of eBay, and I'll let you folks know how it goes from there.

My issue seems to be a common one with the kernel-GENERIC.tgz untar...

I'm guessing it has to do with the amount of space, like Snappy! said it takes up quite a bit of memory. I may need to spring for a larger card before attempting this. That Magicstor is looking pretty good, but then again a 1gb CF would be nice too. I'll look around this weekend and try to get one.

I've got an exam today, but after that I can dive into HPC *nix all I want... Hehe.

Apparently those precompiled packages should work under 2.0.2 as well, which would be very handy.

I'll check the Sunday papers and see if there are any deals on CF cards. If I can get one locally that will save me some heartache. It will be worth it just to have X running with a terminal... Oh the anticipation.

My CF reader is a USB reader... anyone know of a good Live CD distro I could use to get it working? I'll probably need that when I get a successful install so I can tarball it for us.

I've been having good luck with damn small linux.. and the download's only 50mb - hard to beat that!