720degrees Linux for the Jornada 720

Yeah, it did run out of space quickly, but with a lot of optimizations, I actually got a lot on there. Development is delayed for another week once again....

Maybe that I'm going a bit offtopic, but is there any 16 bits PCMCIA 802.11g wifi card that works ok in the Jornada using the WPA supplicant (and 720degrees of course)?

Is school the reason for the delay ?

What is this crap that has recently been posted here ? Buy drugs online ? WTF?

Some URL blacklisting feature would help maybe ?

Edited by QuantumII 2006-06-04 10:52 AM

Hey PS, does your redist support CardBus?

Guest, I might be wrong but I presume that it is physically impossible for 16bit card to transfer 54Mbit/s due to PCMCIA 16bit slot limitations and therefore there are no such cards. But, as far as I'm concerned, 802.11 standard should be backward - compatible, so you should look for an 802.11b card that supports WPE. You may want to start with the HCL.
regards

Edited by fijam 2006-06-04 1:49 PM

Hope I'm not overstepping my bounds but I drew this up to help put this issue to bed:



Ok I'll set the record straight here (as the self-promoted WiFi guy of the development team).

Also the CAPS mean I am putting emphasis somewhere…not shouting :-)

1. 802.11B works in G UNLESS the G access point is set to "G only" ... nobody does this unless it's a personal AP and they only have G cards (even then it is very rare). There is only a 30% performance hit (at most) with B on G networks (and the hit is on G clients NOT B clients). Because wireless is a SHARED medium only one client can talk at a time so when a B cards starts talking the AP switches link layers. (kind of a gray area as it is does not switch RF but it does switch the link encoding scheme that is different between the B and G but the RF signal and channel are still the same….so perhaps there would be layer between the link and network layers) and now the speeds are different, then switches back for G (this is software not hardware so the “switch” is a detection of packet encoding). Wireless uses similar collision detection as Ethernet. And because G and B use different link layers (OSI model here people) the AP must switch, using only one link layer means only one of the two kinds of clients can communicate. The AP switches encoding schemes when packets come in and can only respond to one client at a time after everybody has stopped talking.

2. Security and encryption have NOTHING to do with the card you choose! That was a marketing ploy under windows that a card won’t support something. Any card that can get on the medium (RF) and link layers can have ANY encryption it needs (WEP, WPA/2, 802.1x, MAC, etc…). On Windows (until XP SP2 came along) the card drivers HAD to provide ALL encryption. When a company stopped adding new features to driver upgrades the card officially became obsolete. Now under XP you can use WPA/WPA2 (MS patch to get MS WPA2…check the MS site) with ANY CARD!!! That means the oldest B card on the planet can do WPA and WPA v2 (on winXP). Since it’s all done on the host CPU as long as the card delivers packets on the network layer you’re good! Same has always been true for Linux since WPA made its debut. Find a well supported card (driver-wise) and it can use WPA. Encryption these days is done on the host processor. Gone are the days when a cards security is done onboard. Reason? Because implementations (including intel’s centrino Wifi chipsets) are very buggy…people got made, standards differed and they need to be able to easily upgrade…so now it’s software (and it’s cheaper than putting faster processors in the card). And just so you know even on the j720 with FULL WPA2 encryption at FULL bus speed the system service takes only around a MAX of 20% of the CPU time…it’s very small.

3. CardBus and PCMCIA are compatible in only one direction. All PCMCIA cards can be used in CardBus. Cardbus is PCI-based, PCMCIA is ISA-based. If you look under windows on all new laptops at the busses you have you will STILL see ISA, because your cardBus has a PCI-to-ISA bridge in it so you can use older ISA-based PCMCIA cards.

4. Performace: Given the bus speeds on the j720 I get around 300KBps on a wireless transfer, that’s about 200KBps LESS than the max 802.11b standard. So upping to G won’t give you anything new. Also most B cards tend to have MUCH, MUCH, MUCH higher transmitting power than G cards (because they made quality stuff back then!). So you get a better experience and can go farther (talking senao here people).


So to recap, don’t bother asking for G cards. They do NOT exist for PCMCIA mostly because of the ISA bus speed (they cannot transfer data at that rate), you get better cards (power-wise and antenna-wise) by using B (externals mostly). Any card with a driver under Linux should work with any encryption, period. The windows marketing tricks don’t work under Linux because Linux drivers and services are not provided solely by the driver for a single device (accept for WEP, it can be either). All drivers then need another usermode application that decodes and encodes packets based on the standard you choose (runs as a system service).

I hope that explains and settles everything. Find the best B cards you can you’ll be a happy camper no mater where you go!

-Weblacky

Actually, weblacky, C:Amie just gave me some hints that strongly suggest that we test a cardbus usb card. It is worth a try - apparently there are some things that we don't know about.

Would this have anything to do with the fact that cardbus cards fit into the slot, even though that tab should prevent it?

No, it has to do with the fact that CE only allows 16bit cards. We have no idea of what the 720's pcmcia slot is actually capable of.

Thats what i meant. Cardbus cards aren't supposed to fit into non-carbus slots (theres a tab thingy on them), and yet they fit in the Jornada... Interesting...

This also applies to some old laptops too, they fit, but the laptop is still isa-bus only. Does anything at all happen when you plug in the card (under linux of course)?

At the moment I only have a 256Mb CF card, so I don't know if I'll be able to run X on 720degrees (I got nearly 190Mb used just installing ssh and a few other packages. apt-get lists are huge!) and I'm still waiting for kdrive package to be released.

As I wanted to try X, I followed instructions here:
http://www.lowlevel.cz/log/pivot/entry.php?id=41
and I installed the customized Opie image (opie....covex.rootfs.tar.bz2)
Everything went really fine without any tweaking.
Now I have kernel 2.4.31-j720-5 and Opie runnig quite well: backlight doesn't work, and sound stopped working after installing opie sound recorder, but I'll try to fix it later.
But Opie is not what I want. 720degrees looks perfect for me, when you got it all working.
I have a QTEK 2020 (Himalaya) with a WM2005 rom (from www.buzzdev.net) for my PIM data, and I'd love to use the jornada as a wifi linux box mainly for internet and remote management.

The thing I like best of Opie is that "df -h" shows just 34.4Mb used!!
By the way, do any of you know Geexbox? It's incredible to me how they can put a whole mplayer media center with many many features, as network and wifi support, DVB-T usb cards support, remote control and many downloadable codecs, into a 6mb to 20mb image!!
If you don't know about it, I'd go to www.geexbox.org and have a look. Get Geexbox iso generator and build the image with your custom configuration.

Back to the thread, I have tried inserting a Conceptronic CON1394C cardbus firewire adapter and it fitted perfectly, but dmesg doesn't show up anything about it (in Opie console). lspci and lsusb don't work at all (I think they are missing).

Maybe it's not included firewire support in this kernel? Or maybe 32bit carbuses will not work at all in the 16Bit Jornada slot?
Maybe somebody can compile a kernel with firewire or usb support on it so I can try it?
It would be great to be able to add usb or firewire to the jornada!!!

Tomorrow I'll get from a friend a Mentor PCMCIA (I think it wil be cardbus actually) with 2 ports USB 2.0. I'll try it with 720degrees when I get a microdrive.
I think it will be very soon.






Edited by ramoncio 2006-06-06 5:23 PM

Then we are two who are getting microdrives "very soon" (Unless something else very attractive pops up from somewhere) *cough* hpcs *cough*

Well I was told the 720 has PCMCIA because the sa1110 processor has only pcmcia (ipaq groups have tons of these comments that say the built-in sa1110 pcmcia bridge is 16-bit only)...I would say however that in the event (I believe it unlikely) that it is cardbus the sa1110_cs driver is mostly based on PCMCIA assumptions. If someone were to somehow (looking at chip datasheets?) prove it was cardbus the driver will need to be rewritten.

Also just because the slot is not keyed to block cardbus does not mean a thing. I have an old CTX laptop that does not block unsupported cards...they still don’t work…

While I certainly respect others checking and cross checking it seems a little quick to say that the slots could support cardbus just because cardbus cards fit in it…the cards may even get power (that’s normal as the pins are in the same place).

The familiar Linux wiki has this j720 page:
http://handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/HpJornada720


This syncs with info I have seen in other developer’s sites. Basically saying that the controller does not know the cardbus standard even if the slot itself MAY be cardbus compatible…that is something to think about. The slot mechanism might be cardbus capable (just a part after all) but the platform may still have this limitation.

Looks like others have tried this…but it does not hurt to check :-)

Also starting next week I can start updating my j720 and start hacking up more stuff….also is someone going to setup a Wiki. It would be nice to post the Wifi stuff....

-Weblacky


Edited by weblacky 2006-06-07 1:28 AM

First, you need to compile in proper support for these things in the kernel, currently it is compiled to not support them, obviously. I will try to get my hands on a cardbus card, then test. I also doubt that the 720 is limited by software in Linux, we just need to compile everything in and test.

z80 wants to make a wiki. However, he has to show me that his blows every other one I have seen away first, because I find them to be hardly useful tools at all. I always get stuck in poorly designed or incomplete wiki's, maybe this one will be different, eh?