Mobilepro 900c and linux is possible?

The jtag info you I thought you were trying to get....

well the jtag pins have been measured fine, it just required desoldering a cpu off a dead mb

ive posted the info in this thread.

so thats alright, the software is the problem we've tried two kinds of wiggler cables, and one more (not wiggler) and no go

First let me say that Linux on the 900c is a dream come true, and THANK YOU to Cosmo0 and to everyone else involved in making the dream a reality. As a long-time MobilePro user and budding Linux enthusiast, I've been following this thread since its beginning.
Anyway, I followed Michel's BEAUTIFUL install guide. I get Linux to start up on my MP... the little penguin appears in the top left, text scrolls for a while, then it just freezes: just a blank screen (mouse pointer nestled in the upper left, lol)... I made the dummy gx.dll since I have the cmonex rom. ..I'm using Opie distro, so it should go into the GUI, but nope. Anyone else run into this, or any ideas why this would happen? In the guide it says to use at lease a 256mb card, but I used a 128mb. Is this the cause of the problem (if so, I'm sorry for wasting your time)? BTW, why is a 256+ card necessary?

Hi kratom,

a) A short freeze happens sometimes.
b) I have found that with some network cards inserted the system crashes, as it wants to read a disk image from the networkcard .

c) no 256+ card is necessary for Opie - fits easily, so that is not the problem. IceWm needs more space.
But have you checked if the 'tar -xvjf ...' finished correctly? Maybe a corrupted library or so.

I propose you just repeat the following in order:

- Retry with only the cf card inserted
- retry with a freshly downloaded zimage copied to the 8Mb partition
- retry with a freshly downloaded Opie. No need to reconfigure the card, just repeat the tar command.



Edited by michelbel 2007-06-21 7:49 AM

Is there a bug reporting system ?

in my specific case

mp900c + Opie, I lost the touch-screen 3 times on 3 different boot. the key board was OK but needed to remove the battery to be able to reboot (can't go everywhere in Opie using just the keyboard)


You guys have done a very good job, and the mp900c was significantly faster on linux than wince.

Also,

users of Ubuntu, add "sudo " before any terminal command line to overide the foolproof system that require you to be an administrator to "root".

after I found the "sudo" (Super User DO) trick, the installation took 10 minutes.

If sudo works on all commands, try > sudo bash to get a root shell. You don't need sudo after that.
Just # exit when finished

I retried the Linux boot with a freshly downloaded zimage and also a new Opie put on the CF card, with the same result. Text scrolls for a while, then the following is displayed for a few seconds before the screen goes blank (except for mouse pointer and an underscore in the top left corner). The only way to unfreeze it is hard reset. Any ideas? Thanks.

Freeing init memory: 96K
Failed to set owner -root- for -var/lib/ipkg-.
Failed to set mode -0075- for -var/lib/ipkg-.

I've set up a build environment for optimized packages, any requests can be posted here. So far, I've built kdrive (xserver), ruby, gcc, xfce and ion3. I'll upload them both as an online feed and as a tar.gz file if requested.

I can't get wireless to work, so I use a second CF card in the PCMCIA slot as an install medium. Hope to see an update to the kernel soon

I use that trick on machines where I'm in the sudoer file, but don't know the root password, works like a charm

kratom: Those types of errors happen when the extraction of the root file system is not done as root user. They are permissions errors. As stated above.. make sure you are root user from your linux desktop/livecd whatever.

The mouse pointer has nothing to do with linux by the way. Its an oddball thing that happens when using cmonex's custom rom. It's actually ce.nets mouse pointer, and for whatever reason it doesnt disappear, even after linux boots.

yukito: Cool. Although not really needed. I built a few armv5tel (xscale) packages and noticed no speed increase over the armv4 packages. Also everything i've built in the jlime feed/userlands i used every gcc opimization known to man, so there are a good 7000 packages already available to use.

Or any pdaXrom or openzaurus userland and packages would work also.

Cheers.

Edited by RTFM 2007-06-22 5:15 AM

For those interested.... I'm rebuilding my icewm userland for xscale (armv5te) and the 900/900c. It will be an exact duplicate of my latest j7xx image (06/24/07) minus the jornada specific stuff. So look for it over on jlime's devfiles within the next few days. There are already people building 900/900c package feeds, so i wont bother building extra packages yet, just whats needed for the icewm image, as i have alot to do yet on the j7xx side of things.

Cheers.

hey michelbel, did you determine the type of the DOC yet?

As Cosmo Wrote: Oh yes, the DOC label is M-Systems DiskOnChip Plus MD3831-D32-V3-X

- NAND flash available in 32 and 64 MB varieties. Standard DOC 8KB window - so should work with the infradead drivers provided the ID is accepted. No surprises there.
I downloaded the datasheet somewhere.....Digging tonight.

WOW - it's great to see how you're all using this

Firstly - I've done more work on pcmcia support. Cards now power up correctly when inserted and should be working fine. (well my orinoco wireless and 3com ethernet work)

Download the new zImage from same place as before and while you're there look in the latest_source directory if you want to get the source and try compiling your own kernel and modules.

Orinoco support is in the zImage and after you insert the card you can do
iwconfig eth0 essid YOUR_ESSID
ifconfig eth0 up
udhcpc eth0

Secondly, michelbel - GREAT guide, I love it. Doesn't really matter where it's hosted I guess. I'm going to get the kernel source into the jlime project so mp900 will have official jlime support and as mentioned people are already building custom mp900 userlands (yukito is that you Wim ? sorry, confused with all these names - ah just checked my pm's ) So you could think about getting this info up on jlime forums too michel.

Cmonex I agree about jtag importance - we need jtag if we want to flash custom linux roms onto the mp900c flash, and I think that's an area where mp900 is superior to jornadas (correct me if I'm wrong) Also we need to know if we brick our mp900's during linux development there is a way to save them.

Cmonex jtag is REALLY tricky and not many people have the skills you do to figure it out so please don't give up (I know you won't really - hey all the best with exams ) - at least OCD commander is recognising the cpu, sounds like timing issues (pxa memory register initialising) maybe ... I'd like to try this myself but I have yet to build a cable. I've had my head buried in bootloader asm figuring out the pcmcia powerup issue...

Bill, email me for that matter any of you testers out there please email me (my address is in the readme file with the kernel zImage) I don't want to get innundated but feedback is appreciated at this stage

And RTFM re speed issues, I have nothing to compare with but I do hope we can improve things somewhat (guess we'll be limited by hardware quality) To be honest I can't be certain the processor is even running full speed at this stage (something about 100MHz vs 400MHz turbo in kernel messages) and for sure some graphics acceleration could be implemented on the Epson interface. Early days, more coding needed....

cheers everyone, thanks for feedback - cosmo0