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

OK! CF reader arrived today, as well as a 32mb CF card (yay, backup card!). I doubt I'll get much done today as I have a friend coming over, but we'll see.

Yes, yes.. I'm an idiot for staying up late to do this.

Oh well!

First off, I'm using the netbsd 3 beta.. 2.02 or whatnot was giving me problems so I decided to go bleeding edge.

1. Backed up everything, please remember this step!

2. Partitioned and formatted a CF card with a 15mb Fat16 partition and dropped pbsdboot.exe and netbsd.gz (unarchived the .gz first) onto it.

3. Popped said CF card into my HPC. Also inserted my cf wifi card in it's pcmcia sleeve.

4. Ran pbsdboot.exe, selected the closest HPC (MobilePro 780) and the correct path to netbsd, hit boot.

5. Was greeted by the beautiful install screen

6. Ran network setup to get my wifi card set up correctly - it was COMPLETELY painless, though I didn't have the option to specify the SSID so I had to walk to the other side of the apartment to avoid my neighbour's open network (they have a much slower connection). Please note that I'm using no WEP right now, only MAC filtering.

7. Began the install, using the ftp linked above as a source.. and



I am currently in a nicely running install. I will update if I get any further, but it seems to be going nicely.




I'll also write a nice howto if this works out well, running through the installation as I did it step by step.

I think that about covers it. Touch screen works nicely.





Now, to turn this into something usable would still be A LOT of work. I'm going to order a microdrive and then we'll see where this goes from there.

awesome keep up the good work!

Congrats corporate!

See if you can find the ipkgs for opie. Having opie installed would make NetBSD on your 790 that much more usable as a PDAHPC! ... then you can start installing things like Opera 7.55 on it ... if you can find a build for mips ...

On Opera, IBM has a multimodal thingie that contains a build for StrongArm devices like Zaurus ...

Again, if you were like me, getting opie running would give you that "ahhh ... it was worth the trouble!" ...

Thanks for the encouragement!

This was mostly just to see how easily it could be done - I'm going to buy a microdrive (eBay, most likely) before I start any real work on this. To be honest, I largely fumbled my way to the point shown above


And thanks for the pointer on opie, Snappy!. I'll be sure to check it out.

All,
just read through all pages of this and although i could understand what the (*&% was going on I have to say i'm very impressed by your efforts to get *nix working on a HPC

As a 790/HC-7000 owber all I can say is keep up the good work, it would be nice to see all those apps (especially a decent browser) working on a HPC

cheers

Tony

All,
just read through all pages of this and although i could understand what the (*&% was going on I have to say i'm very impressed by your efforts to get *nix working on a HPC

As a 790/HC-7000 owner all I can say is THANKS and keep up the good work, it would be nice to see all those apps (especially a decent browser) working on a HPC

cheers

Tony

The plan is indeed to make a fully functional replacement (but better) for Windows CE - I'd like to be able to offer everyone (at least with a 780/790/anything close) a fully functional portable linux machine - with an up to date web browser, email client, irc and instant messaging.. And who knows what else.

Problem is this is taking away my pda - and my lust keeps making me want to buy an axim X50 ;p

Well, I went about bought an X50v.. but that's beside the point.

The point is that I've started a writeup from my initial experience, though I'll rewrite the whole thing in depth soon. It can be found here.

Hehe, nice to know you're still looking into doing this!

My 790 finally found its way back to the seller, and now I'm feeling gadget-lonely.

All that talk about the x50v makes me wonder ...

Apparently you can buy coupons on ebay and knock off like $150 of the price (I found this out too late, unfortunately)... Bring the x50v down to like $300 US

x50v *sucks*
battery life is crap. like asus 730 and i've seen that with my eyes (how pathetic the battery in it is).

get a nice jornada 72x or a ce.net hpc for that price!

Does anyone know if either kernel 2.6 on linux or the new kernel of NetBSD will have full suspend? (not just screen blanking...), because I do not like the power porblems at all...

-If I did not have to worry about them, I would be working on Debian more!

How would I be able to tell if it was just blanking or actually suspending? It seems to go into a full suspend when I hit the power button (running netbsd beta 3 here), takes a little while to turn off and a little while to turn back on.