Marcin Juszkiewicz

During Pingwinaria 2007 (15-18 March) I will lecture about OpenEmbedded project. My abstract was accepted and I suppose that opinion about sent paper will arrive to me during next few days.

One of other lectures during event will be about OpenMoko platform (Tomasz Zieliński will talk about it). When I saw this in agenda I decided that I will have to write to him to get some infos so we will not talk about same things. But suprise, suprise — he wrote to me first ;D

BTW — I will translate my article to English and put it online after Pingwinaria.

Yesterday during iPhone discussion I gave URL to OpenMoko phone to some people on IRC. After that I had to answer many questions about it. One of them was Webdesigner and put some critic on colorscheme used on screenshot:

Colorscheme is one of those awful ones. Why grey with orange???

Then I visited OM website and discovered that they started developer program finally. Now I wonder — do I have to write to Mickeyl regarding embedded Linux projects I had contributed to or not…

UPDATE: Koen told me that this info was there from start. So I had to miss it…

Yesterday I got official information that Sharp ended Zaurus line — last production will be in February 2007 and then nothing — no new models, no building of older models. Many people wrote that this is bad thing, that they will miss new toys with Zaurus name…

I am not one of them. Since SL-C3000 (called “spitz”) model I had a feeling that Sharp is not able to create new handheld device for mass market. There was few new things in it but basically it was old clamshell line on steroids. Palmtop built to be used as English<>Japanese dictionary rather then as PDA. Then they released SL-C1000 (“akita)” which was spitz without hard drive (in form of 4GB CompactFlash microdrive) but with 128MB of Flash memory like it was in end of previous clamshell line. Both models were selling quite good and one day Sharp merged Akita and 4GB microdrive and thats how SL-C3100 (“borzoi”) was created. Again nothing new… Some months ago they got out of stock of 4GB cards so SL-C3200 (“terrier”) was created — with 6GB microdrive.

But those models were much worse then other palmtops on market… Windows Mobile devices got Bluetooth as standard, more and more models got WiFi inside (now even 802.11g instead of old 802.11b standard). Sharp did not even tried to compete with them. There were rumours that there was a plan to release SL-C3500 which would get WiFi inside but knowing Sharp it would be some shitty wlan-ng USB stick with drivers lacking WPA and any good support.

Add to it their lack of any support to users… Can you imagine that 2006 models were sold with few years old software created for first Zaurus models? They only did some small modifications to get some of new features supported. Someone told one day:

Sharp should concentrate on building Zaurus models. But they should not touch software — OpenZaurus or pdaX teams do it in much better way.

So I think that it is good that they finally ended Zaurus line — it was visible that they do not have idea which way to go and how to support users of own toys.

BTW: some people asked what will OpenZaurus team do now — we are working on 3.5.5 release for all existing models (except SL-A300 as usual). After release most of us will probably concentrate on fixing bugs, adding software and will move to Ångström distribution as this is future of embedded distros.

Yesterday I finally found some time to test Ångström on progear. Kernel needed to be recompiled (I forgot to include ATA driver) and finally it boot.

Console in VGA mode on XGA screen does not looks good but I ignored it (this is something to fix later). WiFi works, USB keyboard works so I was ready to tweak.

I baked some recipes to get some extra modules and got AC, Battery and Backlight support. It was not ideal but working. I think that next step will be rewriting those drivers and including them in mainline kernel.

First step is done — I converted progear-lcd module into progear_bl which use backlight subsystem and send it to LKML. Got some comments, updated code and who knows — maybe 2.6.21 will get it included…

BTW — It is my first real code submitted into kernel.

2006 year was good. I did few releases as OpenZaurus maintainer, created own company for my paid OpenEmbedded work, got some job offers from respected companies.

January

• Started OpenZaurus 3.5.4 testing cycle.

February

• Finally got rid of ReiserFS from all partitions (except the one which hold builds).

March

• Released OpenZaurus 3.5.4
• Moved hosting to kei.pl hosting centre.
• Tagged OpenZaurus 3.5.4 in OpenEmbedded repository (branch org.openembedded.oz354fam083). All next releases was done from org.openembedded.oz354x branch because Familiar team was not sure will they use OE or not for their work.
• Wrote small util to control CF-XGA card
• I got Ir keyboard donated but because Ir handling in 2.6 kernel was changed it is unused. Someone want to get it and work on getting it supported under 2.6?
• I got WE19 working on collie/OZ 3.5.4 but decided to not push it for users (no real benefits rather).

April

• Testing images of OpenZaurus 3.5.4.1 for clamshells were in test cycle.
• Tested how OPIE handle Unicode.
• Checked does Mileage application can be fixed to look good on VGA and larger resolutions. It was nightmare but can be done.
• Wrote small howto about grabbing movies from TV using mencoder.

May

• Thanks to one of OpenZaurus users I got original Sharp serial cable.
• Generated new (0x61FFDAAB) OpenPGP key.
• Changed website theme to Barthelme.

June

• OpenEmbedded project got two Zaurus models: SL-6000 (tosa) and SL-5600 (poodle). Both machines arrived to me, poodle is now in Mickeyl hands, tosa in mine. Thx goes to Trisoft for donating USB Host cables (one for me, second for Dirk Opfer — our Tosa kernel hacker).

July

• OpenZaurus 3.5.4.1 was released for clamshell models
• We (Ania and I) were on holidays in Olecko and then in Gdańsk.
• I decided to drop support of 2.4 kernel for Tosa — 2.6 is not yet perfect but works nicer then 2.4 did.

August

• OpenZaurus 3.5.4.2-rc1 released for Tosa, Poodle
• Feed browser provided for OpenZaurus distribution. It was started by Koen Kooi and then fixed & extended by me.
• I got job offer from Google. But I will not work for them.
• Published schematics of Sharp Zaurus JTAG cable. It probably needs vendor application but I think that I can get one if will need to.

September

• Started “HaeRWu” company — my own OpenEmbedded related business.
• 3rd release of test images of OpenZaurus 3.5.4.2 released for Tosa and Poodle.
• After 4 years of usage I switched from Nokia 6310i to Sony Ericsson k750i cellphone.

October

• I was on OEDEM 2006 in Berlin, Germany. It was nice to meet all those developers face to face finally.
• I got Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 (spitz) from Mickeyl. It is OpenEmbedded project device. He got SL-5600 (poodle).
• Created Paypal account. Earlier it was not possible because they did not support Poland.
• I had public presentation of OpenEmbedded at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. PDF provided (in Polish language).

November

• Switched my home machine to AMD64.
• Wrote howto about flashing BIOS in PC machines without usage of floppy disk. It is one of most popular posts last months.
• I got Progear 1050HX+ webpad from one of OpenEmbedded users.
• Got 802.11g card from one company to provide 2.6 driver for it. I found few developers and we created project for it on LinuxToGo server.
• Bought Epson Stylus DX4000 multifunction device (printer, scanner, copier) — works very nice under Linux.

December

• Got job offer from one of OpenEmbedded related companies. Starting from February :)
• Wrote howto about usage of task-base way of building images in OpenEmbedded.
• Worked on self hosting of Ångström and other OE derived distros.
• Reflashed Progear with older BIOS to check for better ACPI support. Nothing changed — still no battery info.
• Started work on OpenZaurus 3.5.5 release.

During weekend I was working on getting self hosted build of OpenEmbedded.

I built Ångström-2007.1 for progear and chrooted into resulting image. Then installed some packages, copied OE metadata, archives for SRC_URI and did bitbake nano build.

Some packages was needed to be installed — I added them into new task named task-self-hosting which should contain everything needed to get self hosted build running.

But there were some problems:

1. rpcgen from glibc-utils require cpp

This can be solved by adding RDEPENDS_glibc-utils = "cpp" into glibc.bb recipe. But this is theory because we need glibc to build gcc so dependency chain is result.

1. glibc-dev ‘conflict’ libc-linux-headers-dev

Few headers exists in both packages — I do not know which one are more important. In my build I forced glibc-dev ones.

1. binutils-symlinks ‘conflict’ busybox (and elfutils)

This is reported already in OpenEmbedded bugtracker.

1. subversion has problems with building — I need to check do I have some not-yet-committed patches for apr(-util) and subversion.

2. Perl is too granulated — I installed all 861 perl packages to get quilt-native happy instead of checking which are needed.

But the best thing is that whole process can be done. This shows that OpenEmbedded based distributions are able to build them self using software from feeds.

Today I checked how to flash BIOS on Progear HX1050 webpad. Basically there are two ways:

• using psplash.exe under DOS
• using fpFlashBIOS under GNU/Linux

I do not know does they were provided with default installations.

Flashing under GNU/Linux (Debian ‘testing’ in my case) is simple:

sync
./fpFlashBIOS -w:pb_10404.rom

Application will write some flash block (and verify). Then reboot to check does everything is OK — due to fact, that flashing clear BIOS settings external USB keyboard is recommended. Pressing F2 during bootup (when white screen is shown) will enter Setup.

Beware: unbricking can be hard — flash chips are soldered…

Yesterday I got job offer from one company. They want me to work for them in full time during next months. The best thing is that this job is OpenEmbedded related so I will do what I like to do and will be paid for it.

I accepted offer (who will not :) and today discussed with my current boss about leaving. So from February 2007 I will be free man — only own company work. In other words — starting from Feb 2007 I will get busy on OE rather then on making websites (my current job).