Mobilepro 900c and linux is possible?

michelbel i will ( i just copied yours over the last time ) but there is an issue. Either my firefox is retarted or if im seeing things correctly your updated page lost everything after extracting the rootfs to the cf card....

Cheers.

Yes, dumped by Kompozer...
Repaired

RTFM: Since you rolled the kernel with cosmo's stuff, could you try and compile the kernel with

CONFIG_MTD_DOCPROBE_ADDRESS=0x8000000

I think I can then find the Disk-mapped DOC ( not the ROM part) and see if I can address it from Linux using the mtd modules.
The doc modules are already in the userland I saw, so i just need to get a good start address for the DOC.



Edited by michelbel 2007-11-13 4:31 PM

michelbel: Done. You can grab it here. http://devfiles.jlime.com/Kernels/mp900c/

Cheers.

Thanks. Got it - loaded i. However, I still can't see the internal flash disk at 08000000 . I'll keep trying.

strange...just to be sure i checked again and the nand flash (doc millennium) is indeed at that address...

Can you see it as a disk then from linux? As /dev/nftla1 or so? That was what I was trying.
I cant't get it mounted or see it when running linux.
I load all the modules in /lib../.... /mtd

but modprobe physmap does only show the flash at 0x0

ummm no, nope, i didn't try this under linux

what does physmap show at 0x04000000? i'll tell you, it should see the same flash as at 0x0

Just a note that I succesfully created the linux CF card from Windows, using VMware with virtual Live Linux distribution.

I used VMware player from VMware from here : http://www.vmware.com/download/player/ , plus Damn Small Linux vmx from here: http://ftp.belnet.be/packages/damnsmalllinux/current/dsl-4.0-vmx.zip

A small disadvantage: DSL has no (obvious) fat formatter, so I needed to zero the card first to get it really clean ( dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 ). And then reformat it later. Otherwise windows still sees the whole 256MB after formatting...
But it helps greatly - no more rebooting my PC ( and I can do it on my office machine )

I'll make some notes on my manual about this (real soon now).

According to linux on the mp900c, I have an Agere Systems Wireless PC Card Model 0110 (as identified by pccardctl ident). Which driver does this card use, and how can I enable to automatically get the card to light up and work from the get go in the future?

I guess it is orinoco_cs, but I do not see orinoco drivers in the kernel modules path.

Edit: I also noticed that the "Battery Status:" in Torsmo does not ever list anything for the battery's status. Is there an icewm plugin that has a battery meter of some sort?

Edit2: Every time I tap the "start menu" and Logout, it confirms and tapping Yes just stays in a loop with repeated confirmations but nothing happens.

Edit3: I just launched gcalculator and tapped on the number 5 and it is stuck on pressing it down and the system is unresponsive.

Edited by mscdex 2007-11-28 2:01 AM

Orinoco drivers are built into the kernel, so you wont see them in the modules directory. If the card doesnt work out of the box, try running udhcpc eth0, if that works edit /etc/network/interfaces file to reflect your card, wep key etc.

APM isnt complete in the kernel yet, so battery status wont show anything until then unfortunately.

The logout menu isnt working yet. Just use ctrl+alt+bkspace to drop back to console.

Every so often touchscreen drops out on 900c. We havent figured that out yet.

Cheers.

Manual updated to version 0.7:
added mkdosfs, mke2fs lines
added pointers to VMware and DamnSmallLinux for building card on a Windows host with Linux guest.

Well after building most of the new package feed i had enough built to rebuild the icewm userland. There are major changes and improvements in this release. The ipkg upgrade issue still remains however, do not do it. It hoses the entire system. I've narrowed it down to a few packages, but still havent figured it out completely yet.

Changes/fixes to this release include fully working rox-filer (file manager) that now thumbnails images, displays and handles mime-types etc. Bash is also now the default shell with colored output enabled. Added support for calibration right after startx which is run on first boot, a sleeker gtk2 theme that has much smaller scroll bars for a bit more screen space, minimo-0.2 built from cvs, and a bunch of other stuff.

I still havent figured out how to edit/change the download links on jlime's main webpage, so you can grab it here: http://jlime.com/downloads/releases/henchman/

Please test this. My 900c went up in smoke awhile back, so i cant actually test before i upload anymore. It should be ok however as it is basically the same as my 7xx userland, which works fine.

Cheers.

Hey, thank you so much RTFM! I bought a used 900 off ebay for USD 78 just because of your work.
Still waiting for the machine to arrive. Will install linux on a CF/microdrive right away to test your builds and report here for sure.
A couple of questions for now:
BTW, does it make any difference between running Linux in HPC2000 and doing so in CE 4.2?
And what flavor or distro is this Linux? Is it debian or something else?
If it is debian, I suppose it can take the ARM packages from the official repositories, am I right?
Or is building/compiling stuff on it just as easy as in other standard setup?
And a side question: is it possible to upgrade the HPC 2000 in 900 to CE 4.2? Any pointer/instruction is much appreciated.
Please keep up the good work! Linux is what breathes new life into this old yet very decent machine.

dvm: the difference is that if the OS gets corrupt (you never know, cosmo0 had that when running experimental linux kernel) the hpc2000 bootloader will require the rare serial cable to reflash

so I recommend you update at least the bootloader to version 4.10. what's your current firmware version as listed in control panel / nec firmware info applet on the device? even if it arrives with cenet on it, you should check bootloader version at least.