720degrees Linux for the Jornada 720

The one thing I can give you right now is a working keymap file. I fixed it up myself for the US version of the Jornada keyboard, and you may find use of it. (the [ ] keys work, and such)

I am sending out an email to the seller today.

Thanks PS, but I've already stuck an updated keymap in this distro, and mine supports the [ ] keys as well as Caps Lock. The only thing not working on the keymap I made are the Pound Sterling and Euro signs (I can map them, but they won't print any characters in the console, so I decided not to), and Num Lock (AFAIK there is no way to use the Num Lock state to modify keys not designated as keypad keys.)

I look forward to you getting the microdrive. I'm still working on getting a good X package together.

X does not work from the Debian, like you said, the 720 does not have enough memory. Apparently we both found that out the hard way.

The xserver we need is kdrive, and I found ipkg's for it earlier. That is what Jlime uses, and I am pretty sure that Karloch had an arm version of it set aside as well.

EDIT: Please don't link to my fake forum from your site. I don't plan to ever use it, it was simply an experiment. And now someone posted there.

Edited by ProgramSynthesiser 2006-02-24 8:53 PM

I have the microdrive, and it works.

Yay! I'm glad to hear you didn't need to go through any eBay hassles to get it.

I've also updated the 720degrees website to not link to your "fake forum".

About the X server, I have the same ipkg's for kdrive from handhelds.org. The problem is that I would not like the distro to have to rely on the Ipkg repositories to get certain files. I'm thinking to convert the kdrive ipkgs to debs and have them hosted as a repository for the distribution. It's also an issue as to whether to use the kdrive ipkgs from Familiar stable or unstable.

Right now, my personal installation has ipkg on it to handle situations like these, but I think it would be too much trouble for the end user if the distro needs both ipkg and apt. I thought about tarballing the extracted files from the ipkgs, but I also want the kdrive xserver to "play nice" with the dependencies that can be satisfied by the Debian ARM repository. The Handhelds.org/ipkg repository has a number of files that are unlikely to ever be hosted by the mainline Debian, like touchscreen support libraries.

Yeah, I can probably help you with that.

For now, just try extracting the files from the ipkg's, and then we can figure out what to do.

Oh, use unstable.

Oh, could you help me find a good email server? Exim seems ok, but I still want something smaller. Not exim...it is exim4 or something.

Sendmail is obviously huge. Postfix uses a lot of memory.

Snickersmd, great work. I got a mail from PS and when I saw the thread with your distro I installed it in no time. Your distro is working like a charm, although I have customized it a bit. PS is right, you should remove exim4 from the image, it is a good MTA but quite heavy, I don't use it even on my Pentium II server. I recomend you to use qmail. Qmail is the most powerful MTA yet it is also incredible light, feature rich and easy of configuration. It will run without problems even on a 486. Qmail is not a MTA, it is - the MTA -

Sticking again on topic, you distro is really wonderful, a full Debian working on our Jornada, no problems updating or installing new packages. I have completely set up a system that cover completely my needs. You have just now to build a DEB package with kdrive and touchscreen support for your distro and you will have a full feldged Debian.

Sadly, there is still a thing preventing us to use Linux as we should on the Jornada, and it's the ever anoying: no way to reboot to WinCE - no real Linux suspend - no way to poweroff the device thing. I have been looking at the Michael's tech docs about the SA-1110, but they are a bit too much for me. I have been thinking about the battery hardware hack, but, although we put an off switch, the result is not the very same as removing the battery with the device running? I think that software is the only way... Is there any hope that someone gets a way get back to Windows CE without removing the battery just as Jlime does?

PD: I have tried to do a shutdown -h now with your distro. Then the screen goes black, but the device is still on, you already know this. Then I pressed the software reset button. Surprissingly I got to the HP Invent boot screen and I though that Windows CE would boot up, but the Jornada remains on this screen forever. Maybe arround here the key that we need to accomplish the back to CE and suspend thing?

This is karloch writting on the forum from the Jornadav 720, using links2 under kernel 2.4.32-j720-9 with 720degrees

Yes, karloch - I think the key to rebooting into CE has to do with the shutdown command. Or at least, one of the scripts it runs. But I am not sure.

My guess is that we have to give it the instruction to clear ram, and return to the beginning of the CE rom. But I don't know how.

I wonder - could we go so far as to even backup everything in CE's ram when linexec runs, and to somehow restore this on reboot?

Personally, I still am more interested in figuring out how to get full suspend working in Linux. If we can somehow get the Jornada to look elsewhere than the beginning of the CE rom, we would have it.

Lol, sorry - this is all rather complicated.

Thanks for the suggestion on Qmail, I will look into it.

Thanks. Well I know exim4 isn't really best suited for the Jornada, and I also remove it afterwards. The only reason it's on at all is because my goal was to provide a default installation with no package customization at all (except for PCMCIA and WiFi support, which is really needed). What you get in my basic fileset would be exactly what you would get if you were able to hook up a CD rom to the Jornada and install a Debian base installation directly on it. The user should be able to decide what packages he/she wants to install and how to configure. Of course, that doesn't mean that we can't improve the distro by customizing it further, choosing better lightweight alternatives and stripping useless data like unused locales. This after all is the goal of PS's distro, a tightly preconfigured system. The idea is choice, you can take my image, install it without the headache of making multiple partitions and working with debootstrap and package dependencies, and customize it from there. Or once PS and I are done, you can have a system that you can just drop in and use. There will be loads of options, and that's the overall goal.



Actually I'm doing just that right now, I'm taking the kdrive ipkgs and their dependencies from Handhelds.org, and repackaging them as debs to also coincide with dependencies from the main repository. Basically this means that I have to extract each package, and edit the control files with the right dependencies. For example, if you install the kdrive package as-is from Handhelds.org, then it looks for libz1 to be installed, even though your Debian install already has zlib1g, and both are the exact same file under different package name. Or my personal pet peeve, the kdrive package requires libc6 2.3.5+cvs2xxxxxxx and dpkg does not recognize this versioning to know that your installed libc6 2.3.5-13 is in fact newer. These little things prevent direct compatibility of the ipkgs with the deb repository, and when I am done you should be able to add a 720 degrees repository to your apt sources, and apt-get a meta package which will link all the kdrive needed packages, from both custom pulled-from-ipkg and the Debian mainline repository.



A hardware hack would actually be electrically the same as physically removing the battery at the touch of a button. However, it is no longer a priority on my list since I am now taking an active role with the distro, and particularly, X. I will get around to it, and post pictures.



I agree with PS that there needs to be a special script or code put in with the Linux shutdown sequence. Now it would be great if we could solve the true suspend problem with brilliant programming, but I'm ready to accept it if the hardware limitation we have completely makes it impossible. I think it's more feasible to properly initialize the memory for the WinCE rom rather than hope that we can code a way to put the device to sleep directly, since the latter is really a processor issue. Therefore, the goal should be Shutdown Linux and Return to WinCE gracefully rather than Brilliant Hack for Native Linux Suspend... but anything is possible with some ingenuity and determination

One of the reasons that kernel maintainers have said they can't get native suspend working has to do with needing specialized reinitialization code from the WinCE rom, and those who have tried to disassemble the rom have not been able to find the needed code. If it can be found and extracted, I think it would be very viable to "taint" the kernel with a copy of this code, since the code is licensed for use on a Jornada, and you're using it on a Jornada. It could be a mechanism similar to how the Atmel WiFi PCMCIA cards need non-free firmware images to run in Linux. However this is mere speculation on my part, and it would take one badass of a coder to find the trick and pull it off.

I like this idea. Two thoughts for implementation for programmers up to the challenge:

Approach 1: Take a snapshot of a fresh initialized RAM image that has the exact state of memory from a hard reboot of WinCE. Gzip it and distribute it along with a shutdown code which extracts this general image into memory.

Approach 2: Program it like the Hibernate function on modern laptops, where the existing memory is copied to an image, and compressed on the fly to the FAT partition on the CF card. Linexec makes new images, shutdown program loads image from card to Jornada RAM. This would have the added effect of true dual boot between WinCE and Linux, putting one up over the Jlime guys

Maybe you could try to port suspend2 (Software suspend) to the ARM arch. The framework for supporting it is in the kernel, you'll only need to figure out how to make it work in the SA-1110. For resuming, you'll only need to specify the name of the swap partition.

Snickersmd, there are ways around those irritating dependencies. This may sound crazy - but it is the way I do it.

Manually type in what apt or ipkg want to see. You see, all the installed packages are kept inside a file, I forgot its name, but it is in /var/dpkg or somewhere around there. If you have the file installed once, you save the little bit of text it has. Then, you can physically remove it, repaste the text that says it is installed back into the file, and apt happily ignores any problems. Of course, since we are smarter than apt, there are none.

I can show you what I mean later.

EDIT: In the meantime, there are a lot of problems with 720degrees that I need to go through and fix. For some reason, wifi works half the time, and it is not acting like Sarge at all. In addition to that, when wifi does work, apt does not receive all of the file lists, so I cannot upgrade yet. All small stuff once wifi is stable on my end.

EDIT2: Ok, I was able to solve problems by rebooting. Still, I will install pump in addition to dhclient, because it tends to work more. Another goal would to get my ethernet card working, a 3Com 3CCFE574BT (The only part that matters to linux is 3Com and 574 )

Edited by ProgramSynthesiser 2006-02-25 11:58 PM

Ok, all of those problems are solved, except for the 3com. But it is apparently known not to work, so oh well. I would do better with a less-power-consuming ethernet card anyways.

Oh, and I am currently trying to find the sources for Xserver kdrive. Snicker and I both do not like the ipkg's, and this version would not be a crippled compile. In addition to that, it would not need to be extracted from a deb. I used to think that adding ipkg to the distro would help it, but it actually cripples it. We are using full binaries, and only limited ones where necessary.

I still see promise in busybox... (6mb saved! )

EDIT: Tinylogin is also good. I used it, and it worked. Now, if I can get it to display what I want at boot, some disk space will be saved. Oh, I need to check out qmail as well.

Edited by ProgramSynthesiser 2006-02-26 2:19 AM