J-720 Distro Progress

Well, the email got through, and he replied already! I am asking him permission to post his email here, but here is my summary:

- He has not disappeared, but is very busy with other things.

-2.6.14 boots, but wifi mysteriously does not work, nor does much of anything else. Currently, it is worse than 2.4.31, it can not suspend at all. Also, he said that 2.6.14 will not help much with power saving, as the wakeup code is embedded on the CE rom. (Kind of grey area there)

- Essentially, for the 2.6 kernel to work, we need lots of developing.

Karloch, I'm already working on a distro!

EDIT: Oh, it was you who made this thread!

http://www.todopocketpc.com/foro/showthread.php?t=69392&highlight=jornada+720

For some reason I thought it was Kristoffer, which led to some bitter words in A Call for Help, because he never tried to contact me. Sorry about that.

Edited by ProgramSynthesiser 2006-01-30 9:52 PM

I made my first post on todopocketpc.

I hope my Spanish is correct...ish..





Attachments
----------------
screenshot.jpg (25KB - 4 downloads)

gah, ive never understood why you thought kernel 2.6 can do suspend better, it is not developed specifically for PDA's.

but booting back to ce, that's a nice idea.

I've heard so, and I even read about it on the list.
If you want I could buy a Hitachi Microdrive for you. It's for 95$ (300 PLN , 3,16 PLN for a US$). It's with receipt so you should be able to get warranty in US. There will be some shipping costs but microdrives are very light so it shouldn't be that much.
And I would be interested in J690 but most ppl on Ebay do not send to Poland.
I think we could help each other.

Edited by raul 2006-01-31 3:09 PM

Well, that's better than nothing.


I told you We must go with 2.4.31 that has a really good support.


Yep, but if you were to wait to a kernel 2.6, it would take ages; so I started to research on my own way. I think that we can join forces now, although I can't do so much.


Yes, it was me At TodoPocketPC there are much people that would LOVE to use Linux on the Jornada 720 (I include myself on them), but they are average users and not developers.

Ah, about your post at TodoPocketPC, you did it right

The first thing that we should do, it's to learn how Jlime manage to rebbot back from Linux into Windows CE without removing power supply. We should ask any of the Jlime developers. On the other hand, it would be good if we can get the Jlime team to develop a Jornada 720 version of the distro, but using 2.4 kernel. However, they use ipkg, that has a really small respository (already used it with Familiar)... We must go for Debian ARM!!

I have a friend of mine (who happens to be Polish ) that is better at those things than I am. Although, I am not one to accept charity, it makes me uneasy. We'll see, I think I might be able to get enough money by the end of the week.

Also, the $179 price here was at Best Buy for a 4gb, and (in addition to Best Buy being known for high prices), all I want is a 2.2

How about I get back to you on that sometime, I just really don't want to make anyone spend their own money on me (ok, the distro ).

As far as the 690, ask around the forum. I might also be able to get my friend to help you there, I think our Ebay tends to have more of those kinds of items.

PM me.

Moving along...

Ok, ok. You, cmonex, and practically everyone who talks to me on msn messenger can say "I told ya so!" *mutters under breath*

Still, 2.6 would have made me happier. One day...

Actually, I have something that you could do. Because I was busy waiting for 2.6, I never figured out how to get the battery status working in 2.4. That caused me to rely on my own (rather accurate, really) knowledge of my battery life with the uptime command. But it was bloody annoying! Same with some other status stuff. I modified the 2.4 kernel slightly to give me orange text, as the pink drove me up the wall. I could not possibly ask you to figure out why it is pink and not white, lets leave that to Kristoffer. (I'll ask Michael about it)

Also, I would like to contradict you on Debian ARM. That stuff is the most bloated *I'm not cursing! It's between stars! * that you could ever imagine. It is simply unnaceptable for an embedded distro. I had to hand delete many files. Ipkg, as you also noted, is limited. Not only that, but it sucks. I see it as a poor excuse for a packaging system. It's terribly slow. Also, the people who compile packages for it leave half the functionality out. *insert busybox rant here*

So, what I propose, is to take the Slackware packaging system, which consists of just the directories where the files go in a tgz file (very easy to do by hand), and use that instead. Once I choose all the Debian packages we will use (or ones I compile insanely myself), we (I ) could manually take out all the junk in the files, and convert them over. Once we do that, we would have a convenient package base, which we could shuffle around, and do whatever we want with. It would take a lot of manual labor to get there, but after that, it's a breeze. (I'm serious)

No, I will not use RPM. Don't get me started.

Karloch, I honestly do not know how you can help out without sucking it up and using Linux on your 720 again....please?

I am so glad that I have some sort of communication with Michael. He is very busy, but it restores some confidence.

-This is very wordy, and I do not know how excellent your English is. Mi español tengo muchas problemas. Probably wrong..

Getting battery status with the 2.4 kernel is far simple: cat /proc/jornada/battery
You can also control brightness and contrast with the /proc/jornada/brightness and /proc/jornada/contrast


I don't think so. It's true that apt-get is a bit slow for our Jornada, but it is perfectly usable. Matthis already probed that you can have a good Debian distro with a 128 MB CF Card. If you get a 512 MB one, you will be able to use the distro as you wish and plenty of free space for anything. Futhermore, if we use a microdrive, let's say... 2 GB, there are plenty of space for Debian ARM. Debian has thousands and thousands of ARM packages ready to run on our Jornada 720.

Even Ipkg can manage DEB files (yes, I installed a DEB package in Familiar using Ipkg). With very little modification of Ipkg, it would be possible to use Debian repository instead of Familiar one.

On the other hand, Debian is developing a distro for embedded devices, called emdebian. The distro is stiell under development. There is not anything downloadble.


I don't get what is the junk among Debian packages. Packages are downloaded and once they are installed, only the files remains, just the same as the tarball (a deb package is actually a pre-install-script, a tarball and a post-install-script. Tarball package system is nice, but not as powerful as IPK or DEB.


I totally agree


I will do as soon as I finish my university exams.


Remember that the first thing to do before building any distro is to know how Jlime does the back to Windows CE reboot.

Greets!

If I had put out a working version of my install, you would understand. I am packing so much in there, with a 128mb project limit, that 300k being wasted on copyright files added during the install (those things are huge) would mean no room for something else. I want a distribution with an incredible amount of software, but that takes little space.

Yes, I am still working on getting into good contact with the Jlime team. ...And Kristoffer.

So, what does hies mean?

That's nice, but if you don't use a standar repository, you will get the same problem as IPKG: lack of packages. But even ipkg has DEB compatibility (I wonder if it is possible to configure it to download from Debian repository and not from Familiar one).


Good ^_^


It's some short of "Hi" with a "es" at the end. It's not spanish nor english. Let's just say "hi"

I could make an ftp repository.

Anyways, how do I get in touch with Jlime? You know, and actually get a response.

Sent off an email to Kristoffer, if he doesn't respond, I will send one to the entire team.

Oh, and here is Michael's email:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi,

> Hi, this is Andrew (ProgramSynthesiser) from the hpcfactor forums. I would
> like to know, have you been doing any development on the 720's 2.6 kernel
> for the past few months?

More or less not. I tried to get 2.6.14 working and it worked (more or
less) but it still has no working WiFi which makes development very hard
for me. I have no idea why WiFi does not work, not even 5V Orinoco
cards are recognized.

> It seems that you have disappeared...

Yes :-( I thought everything gets better after my last tests in the
university, but working on my diploma-thesis is very time-consuming...

> If not, what is the progress? I need to know, it is important for a
> decision I must make in my distribution.

2.6.14 works and I can update the patch to 2.6.15 for you.
The following things do not work:
* Wireless cards
* Every form of power management (CPU freq. scaling crashes the
machine)
* Sound
* IR
* Something I've certainly forgotten...

I'm using the 2.4.31 kernel from my website without big problems and
2.6 will not be able to save more power than 2.4 as the wakeup-code
is in the windows ce rom. And disassembling this did not reveal an
easy way to get that code to restore linux...

Regards,
Michael
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And his follow-up:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Thanks for the reply. This is not very good news...but I am led to wonder,
> why would the return to CE work on the 680 and not the 720?

The ARM processor has a different resume process than the MIPS(?) in the
680. The ARM will always jump to adress 0x0 in ROM on a resume and will
execute the Windows CE bootloader there.

> If you could forward to me anything that you think would help, that would
> be excellent.

You can find the useful ARM ARM here (13MB so not attached):
http://www.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/lehre/2003SS/asm/material/arm/DDI0100E_ARM_ARM.pdf

I'll attach other documents about the hardware of the J720, maybe they
are helpful.

> Also, could I have permission to post this email on hpcfactor?

Yes, no problem. You can post my messages.

Regards,
Michael
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

EDIT: One of his attached messages has the scancodes for the volume control keys. Already something useful!

Edited by ProgramSynthesiser 2006-02-02 11:39 PM

Hello all,

I've been watching this thread with interest. Unfortunately I am not a coder. I am a Linux user of moderate level skill backed by very aggressive Googling. I am also new to Jornadas, having acquired my 720 solely for the purpose of tinkering with Linux on a handheld device.

My Jornada is currently running Debian Sarge on a 1 GB CF card. I tried the PDA-type Linux distros (Opie and GPE) but I wasn't really satisfied with them. This is primarily because I prefer my Palm OS based T3 for PDA functions, so my Linux on Jornada unit should act more like a mobile Internet terminal for blogging and wiki authoring.

I don't see bloat as a significant issue for a Linux distro for the Jornada. It was a big issue for early developers because the cost of expansion memory was prohibitive. Now with cheap 512 mb and multi-GB CF cards available, I don't think that Linux on the Jornada has to have the strict limits of other embedded systems. You (ProgramSynthesizer) claimed the Debian package management is bloated and the ipkg system is unrefined "excuse" for a package manager. On the other hand, why reinvent the wheel? There are thousands of ready ARM compiled packages on both distribution systems, all of which merely need some tweaking to work on the 720.

Given that I'm not so concerned about space, I'm actually using both apt and ipkg to get packages from both distro sets to run on my Jornada, and I'm working on getting a good system together. Right now I'm using matchbox (the underlying window manager behind GPE), dillo for my browser with minimo and lynx as alternatives, and rxvt as my X-terminal. I'd like to hack the existing panel applets to report the battery status and control brightness and contrast, and I'm looking into this extensively.

Having said that, I think hardware support should be your first concern in designing this distro. All the ARM programs are out there and users can choose working programs as per their preferences. But the problem is working support for all the 720 hardware. lowlevel.cz has an Opie distro for the j720 that has sound, battery, and screen control taken care of. I'd like to see these implemented cleanly, along with keyboard support for the function keys (tried shell scripting without your bracket keys? or the lack of a tilde key?) in distros other than that hacked opie image. Power management and full keyboard support have been solved by the NetBSD people and their fixes are on the gmane archives. I'm sure their code can be adapted to work with their Linux equivalents.

Anyway, you now have one more person here willing to help in any way possible to see this distro through. Although, I still prefer a full Debian distro on my j720.

By the way, if you haven't already seen, Michael has updated his ftp site with 2.4.32 kernels. I'm downloading as soon as I post this.

And, someone hacked the jlime forums the other day, so it's gonna be tough to contact the jlime team for a while. If kristoffer is so busy with his med studies that he can't tend to his board, I find it highly unlikely that he'll find the time to restore his forum any time soon. And knowing that he's in med school, I'm sure he's busy. I know exactly what he's going through.

[Edit: removed a double post ]

Edited by snickersmd 2006-02-04 1:17 AM

Glad to see someone else here.

Well, there will be some great things happening soon. First of all, I am capping the distro at under 340mb. Why? Because I found a 340mb microdrive for $12.50 on ebay!

What this will mean is that I will be able to run both the console and X releases on the same drive, and I will also be able to compile all the time, if necessary. My guess is that much of the distribution work will be done on my 720.

Also, even though this is contradicting myself - for now, I will merge the X and console releases together. Therefore, the 128mb limit is temporarily gone, I am releasing some pressure from myself.

Hardware support? That should not take much fiddling, we will see. And I think that I will do things differently this time, and I might start with a somewhat more prepared filebase to begin with, instead of the default Woody install. But I also might not. It would just be to get battery status working, which is important to me. Maybe even sound could work too? I have spent more time on the software than the hardware, but I will finally be able to change that.

Also, as I have already stated, I am highly against both apt and ipkg. This is my distribution, and I want to get it as far away from Debian as possible! Of course, I will leave apt in there, even if it is somewhat crippled. Ipkg is an irritant for me. I will use it to get X and other basics running, and then will probably dump it. I do not want this to be a crippled Linux install, but an incredible one.

Like I said before, I will probably compile a lot of the software, as many ipkg ones do not have enough extras installed, and apt's have too much.

When I get a solid base with a beta out, I will give it to all of you, and give out bits of work to be done. (Assuming that you?, Karloch, and that Linux user who slipped by me join me on this distribution). For now, everyone wait for me to get everything back up and running, it is too much to think about before I even bid on the microdrive.

This is great, I am finally seeing more people cheering this project on!

-Med school? Well that explains a lot. So we have Michael doing major studies, Karloch working on major studies as well...

--2.4.32? Excellent. I will try that as soon as I get the microdrive.

---Oh, and I am starting my programming work again starting tomorrow. (Yes, that would be in 30 minutes, but I need to sleep first!)

----Snappy, forgive me ahead of time, because I will probably be bothering you.

EDIT: Unless if I can get to the point of coding small scripts quickly, there will be a lot of manual labor - deleting files, I mean.

Edited by ProgramSynthesiser 2006-02-04 2:33 AM

You are totally right! We do not want PDA-like Linux on our Jornada, because the Jornada 720 is not a PDA. We want a desktop/workstation-like Linux system.


I totally agree with you in this matter. I have been using Debian on the Jornada for a while and I tell you that the support was almost PERFECT: full sound support, functions keys mapped correctly, touchscreen working nicely, battery status reporting, contrast and brightness control, etc... And I could install almost any program by using the APT with the ARM repository, NO tweaking needed to get the program running on the Jornada 720 after install. If this distribution was almost perfect, why did I drop it? Just because:

* Based on Debian Sarge when it was on the testing branch. Package base are totally unsync with current Sarge that it is stable or even the current testing branch. This causes serious problems when you are going to install basic core packages as gcc or libc.
* No way to poweroff the Jornada or do real suspend. The reboot or shutdown command won't bring you back to Windows CE where you could do a real suspend. So the only way to poweroff the machine is removing the battery. This is no problem if you do few times, but with normal use, this would kill your battery.

Your setup sounds as well as mine. I was using Ion2 Window Manager, that is also great for Jornada 720. How do you power off your Jornada?



As I said up here, full hardware support is already there with the 2.4 branch. We just need a way to get from Linux back to Windows CE in order to get real suspend.


Indeed. Do you know any easy way to bootstrap a debian install on the Jornada? I would like to install a brand new stable, so the packaging problem from the Matthis image would be solved and full support is already there. Almost perfect distro!

However we have still to address the problem with the suspend.


Excellent! Is there some changelog?


That's a bad thing. We need to know how to get back to Windows CE from Linux. Isn't there any Jornada 720 guru in HPCFACTOR?