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Jornada 680e Tigerdirect Special / MA401 HOWTO

wsanders Page Icon Posted 2005-04-09 12:42 PM
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These are the steps I used to get WiFI working on my Dutch Railways surplus
680e and a Netgear MA401 card I had lying around the house:

1) The Tigerdirect special has been sitting in a box for years, so it will
almost certainly arrive with a dead backup coin cell - you will need to
replace this unless you like constantly clearing out the annoying popup
alerts about it.

2) The Tigerdirect special ships with ActiveSync 3.0, which did not
work on my PC. The Tigerdirect special ships with a DB9 serial cable,
no USB. I have a Windows ME laptop with a USB to DB9 adapter, and WS 3.0
only looks for a device on COM1 and could not find the HPC, which was
on COM2. Upgrade to the latest version of Activesync that will work on
your PC, from here: http://www.hpcfactor.com/support/syncsoft/activesync/
USB can figure out the baud rate itself, so set the HPC to 115200.

3) Download the Prism 2.5 HPC Pro reference driver from here:
http://www.hpcfactor.com/support/cesd/h/0020.asp . The Compaq WL100 driver
*may* work but I was unable to try it (see below).

4) Insert the MA401 into the PCMCIA slot. You will be prompted for the
driver name of the hitherto unknown card. The driver name for the Prism
driver is PRISMNDS.

5) Do a soft reset just to make sure, if you are prompted again repeat
step 4. The green light on the MA401 should come on or at least start
flashing to signify you have associated.

6) Now you should be able to open the PRISM control panel and set up
your WiFi parameters: SSID, WEP, etc. I was unable to get WEP to work
with my usual key, due to a stupid bug in the control panel that doesn't
allow entering the alpha-character-based password - it just doesn't
switch over from hex to character text entry. I tried various hex keys:
DEADBEEFDEADBEEFDEADBEEF00, etc, and got nowhere. Finally entering all
zeros in the hex keys worked. Well, it's better than no WEP at all. Of
course disabling WEP worked as a last resort. I was also able to set my SSID
to my house's non-default SSID with no trouble. I had a rinky-dink problem
similar to this with the
Windows ME port of the Prism driver that came with my MA401 - I had to
do something like type spaces after each of the 26-character hex keys
to get it to work.

7) The WiFi icon in the system tray will switch to green when you have
successfully linked up.

8) Go to the Network control panel and select "Intersil
PRISM Wireless LAN PC Card" (not "Intersil PRISM 11Mpbs Wireless LAN PC
Card", which for some reason also shows up on my HPC, probably from an
earlier aborted install) and see if you can get DHCP to work. :-( I could
not. This is just like the normal windows TCPIP setup. Enter a static IP,
default router, name servers, etc, for your setup.

9) Probably after another soft reset, you should have connectivity.

THINGS THAT DO NOT WORK:

- DHCP seems broken, I could just not get the machine to broadcast for
it. So you may or may not be able to go to Starbucks and jack in. This
is not a requirement for me so I did not investigate further.

- Once I had the Prism card recognized, I would not "unrecognize" it, even
after uninstalling the driver. I wanted to switch over to the Compaq
WL100 driver and try it but I was unable to get the HPC to re-prompt for
the driver name. By the way the driver name for the WL100 appears to be
WL100NDS.

-- As a sub note these drivers are in \WINDOWS. CE like other windows
hides DLLs and file name extensions so to see these files you have to
fiddle with the file explorer properties just like on a big windows
machine.

- The Internet Explorer that comes with the 680e is pretty old and won't
render or even connect to a lot of modern sites, particularly if they
require SSL authentication. Gmail is not accessible because of its
heavy reliance on state of the art (some say "voodoo") JavaScript
(unless there is a secret flat-HTML version in there somewhere.) I could
not even log into Yahoo because the 680e's Explorer doesn't have up to
date ciphers.

- Don't expect huge battery life - these older WiFi cards will suck down
your battery and replacement LiIon 680e batteries are insanely expensive,
so you want to baby that battery.


THINGS THAT DO WORK:

- Well, it's not THAT useful for browsing the web, but I can monitor
local weather at my bedside, without the noise and clatter of a laptop
disk spinning, serious weather nerd that I am.

- My local library has an arrangement with MobiPocket, so I can check out
E-Books and read them on the HPC.

- The Jornada is just plain cool. This is about the most amount of fun
I have had for less than $200 in a long time!


Correction, comments, etc welcome.
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matrixcore Page Icon Posted 2005-04-09 12:52 PM
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Just some complementary info

- Gmail WORKS with PIE (Pocket Internet Explorer), they have a basic HTML version that will do the job for the most common tasks, there's no secret url, just point PIE to gmail.com (i think you need 128 bit patch, see below)

- The sites that require 128 bit Secure Sockets layer connections can be accessed, just search for the "128 bit encription pack for Handheld PC Pro", it's an updated dll which will suffice. you can access gmail, ebay, paypal and many other sites requiring secure authentication

- About PIE speed. download Stweaker 2004 from snoogie.free.fr/Jornada.html, there is an option called "speed up PIE", it makes rendering of the web pages a lot faster. also you should consider getting the 32Mb RAM upgrade, it makes browsing faster

Hope this helps

EDIT: about the expensive batteries, you should try ebay, they sell new ones for ~$30 methinks

Edited by matrixcore 2005-04-09 12:57 PM
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cmonex Page Icon Posted 2005-04-09 1:03 PM
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hi

good idea to have written all of these here for the starters.

i'll try to help you now with your issues:

dhcp: maybe it's just not setup correctly. what did you try? do you use a router or what?

about "unrecognizing" - yeah i would like to solve that also... please someone help

have you tried installing the 128 bit security update for IE?
gmail should work (the plain html version you get redirected to)...

battery: you can always buy a jornada 728 battery for 53$, it should fit perfectly and it has 2000 mAh capacity. or you may consider battery rebuilding. i just done it (with the help of one of my friends) and i'm looking forward to testing my "new" 2400 mAh battery!
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cmonex Page Icon Posted 2005-04-09 1:06 PM
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well... i think i'll always refresh the page before submitting my post... lol

stweaker info is new to me. how does it do that for IE?
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matrixcore Page Icon Posted 2005-04-09 1:21 PM
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hahaha you're late again!
I dunno how does stweaker does it, but it "Just Works(r)" i've tried it in a j680 and it speeds up considerably

i suspect it's because normally PIE renders pages when they're almost complete or complete (in big pieces), so they take a lot more time to load. but with Stweaker it renders small partial chunks, giving the feeling of "fast" rendering

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wsanders Page Icon Posted 2005-04-09 6:29 PM
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Thanks for all the hints. I've got the thing the way I want it (except for gmail) so it's time to hold off the tweaking and kicj back and ENJOY it. Currently reading E-book version of "Dude Where's My Country" and the new Crichton novel, and listening to KUT Austin TX FM over the internet on the laptop.

To make my day even better the local electronic superstore (Frys in Concord CA) had a stack of remanufactured Netgear MA401s for $5. Now everything in the house that had a PCMCIA slot is going wireless!

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C:Amie Page Icon Posted 2005-04-09 6:46 PM
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haha, yes the PIE "speed up tweak" in there doesn't actually change the Internet cache, it changes the font buffer effectivly.
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wsanders Page Icon Posted 2005-04-11 10:32 PM
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Unfortunaely PIE crashes the 680e.

Worse, when I removed it, it had trashed the registry settings for the builtin IE, necessitating a hard reset.
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C:Amie Page Icon Posted 2005-04-12 7:51 AM
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Very Strange, you should report that to JM (the developer of sTweaks)
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cmonex Page Icon Posted 2005-04-13 8:07 AM
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err, maybe it speeds up IE sometimes but not always... sometimes it's even slower...
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wsanders Page Icon Posted 2005-04-14 2:19 PM
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With regard to gmail, it will not authenticate with the ancient IE 3.0 stock browser in the Jornada 680e, I get a 302 error. As I mentioned above, PIE hosed my machine. So until gmail simplifies their interface, I won't be getting gmail.

There is a sourceforge project, "gmail-lite", that is a PHP-based gateway to gmail, but you will need to install it on your own PHP-enabled web server, or use the interface a few kind souls have made available on the internet- will you trust them with your gmail password? I could not get it to work, either; I am a semi-expert at this but not a PHP hacker.

Yahoo has a mobile-style browser for their mail service, at wap.oa.yahoo.com. This works fine with http browsers as well.

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Snappy! Page Icon Posted 2005-04-14 4:09 PM
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wsanders - 2005-04-14 12:19 PM

With regard to gmail, it will not authenticate with the ancient IE 3.0 stock browser in the Jornada 680e, I get a 302 error. As I mentioned above, PIE hosed my machine. So until gmail simplifies their interface, I won't be getting gmail.

There is a sourceforge project, "gmail-lite", that is a PHP-based gateway to gmail, but you will need to install it on your own PHP-enabled web server, or use the interface a few kind souls have made available on the internet- will you trust them with your gmail password? I could not get it to work, either; I am a semi-expert at this but not a PHP hacker.

Yahoo has a mobile-style browser for their mail service, at wap.oa.yahoo.com. This works fine with http browsers as well.



hmmm ... from what I know, gmail has updated their site to support basic html without use of javascripts.

Yahoo as well.
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yobaby
yobaby Page Icon Posted 2005-04-28 10:46 AM
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what about Firefox? can it work woth J680e?
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cecrowder
cecrowder Page Icon Posted 2005-04-28 12:54 PM
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How can you get the STWEAKER utility? I tried the URL in the message but it is not there any longer.
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C:Amie Page Icon Posted 2005-04-28 1:57 PM
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It is still on JM's site:
http://snoogie.free.fr/
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