Marcin Juszkiewicz

Yesterday new project was born: writing free driver for Marvell 8385 based WLAN cards. Currently there are few persons involved including me and Holger Schurig. Join us if you are interested.

Holger did research and found that driver for 8388 (USB version of chipset) is GPL licensed and contain newer version of WLAN interface then cf8385 driver which we got from company which sent us cards. I diffed both versions and it looks like USB version has some support for 2.6 kernel added already.

We currently does not have any timeline for release — first we need to get it built against 2.6.19-rc kernel.

Year ago I wrote post about my directory structure for all my work with OpenEmbedded. Recently I discovered that some people on #oe IRC channel follow this too. But they had some questions so I decided to write this post.

I use ~/devel/ to keep all things:

• bitbake/ — Subversion tree of BitBake

• build/ — place where I do all OE builds — for example:

• build/native/ — native i686 build for developing OPIE

• build/wrt/ — build for my OpenWRT powered router

• doc/ — misc documentation (QT/E, Qtopia and other)

• oe/ — OpenEmbedded directory

• oe/org.openembedded.dev/ — development repository

• oe/branch.oz354x/ — frozen repository for release

• oe/hrw-packages/ — my misc testing packages

• openwrt/ — copy of OpenWRT build system

• opie/ — development for OPIE

• sources/ — sources for builds:

• cvs_dir/ — cvs checkouts

• svn_dir/ — subversion checkouts
• git_dir/ — git trees
• dl_dir/ — archives

Each build dir contain those entries:

• packages/ — symlink to packages tree of proper branch (for short paths when I play with bitbake -b)

• conf/ — all configuration files:

• site.conf — contain all paths (CVSDIR, SVNDIR, GITDIR, DL_DIR, BBFILES and common variables like BBINCLUDELOGS

• local.conf — DISTRO setting and build related things like SRCDATE
• auto.conf — MACHINE entry

Split into those 3 files give me possibility to start with new build fast. As I use multimachine thing only change to auto.conf is needed to build for other target device (file is generated with echo command). All common settings are in one site.conf file so for new build I only need to create ~/devel/build/newbuild/conf directory, copy site.conf& local.conf, generate auto.conf, edit local.conf and can start new build.

I hope that someone will find that info useful.

My site.conf:

DL_DIR = "/home/hrw/devel/sources/dl_dir/"
CVSDIR = "/home/hrw/devel/sources/cvs_dir/"
GITDIR = "/home/hrw/devel/sources/git_dir/"
SVNDIR = "/home/hrw/devel/sources/svn_dir/"

PKGDIR = "/home/hrw/devel/oe/org.openembedded.dev/packages/"
BBFILES = "${PKGDIR}/*/*.bb"

BBINCLUDELOGS = "yes"
PARALLEL_MAKE = "-j4"

As I already wrote I switched to amd64 platform and reinstalled Debian on it. Everything works now… except Firefox.

Yes Firefox… I understand that Debian developers decided to not ship it due some licensing problems. But there was discussion about Iceweasel instead of it — too bad that it was only discussion ;( Today I have few possibilities:

• use Firefox 1.5.0.x which is old
• forget about Firefox and stick to Konqueror
• switch to Ubuntu which I do not want to do as I use Debian for years
• build Firefox 2.0 from source
• build Firefox 2.0 from Ubuntu sources

Probably will select one of last ones when will find some free time.

And Opera does not provide amd64 packages too ;(

UPDATE: I have Firefox 2.0 working now. To get it installed and working few steps need to be done:

• add experimental into APT sources
• upgrade libc6 and libgtk2 to ones from experimental
• fetch firefox and libnss3 libnspr4 from Ubuntu
• install fetched packages

Some time ago one company contacted me. They have 802.11g CF card which they want to put on market but first want to get it supported in all Zaurus distributions. Driver is available but only for 2.4 kernel, and OpenZaurus use 2.6 on most of models.

I got driver source (without license information inside) and started hacking on it. During searching for patches I discovered that there are newer versions of Marvell CF8385 driver but due to license (or rather lack of it) you can not get sources..

Weekend will be related to driver hacking — having 54Mbps instead of 11Mbps is something nice ;)

Card info:

Socket 1:
  product info: "Marvell", "802.11 CF", "ID: 04", ""
  manfid: 0x02df, 0x8103
  function: 6 (network)

This is reference card, final version will be branded by one of popular manufacturer (and it is not Linksys or Sparklan).

My home router is powered by OpenWRT WhiteRussian RC5 which I installed months ago. For my usage it is ok, but as there is a new release I decided to look does it is worth upgrading.

Their website give access to Changelog but as ‘svn log’ output nearly which is bad because they write useless comments like “fix dependency” or “oops... typo :)” so you can’t find out what was really changed. And you can not upgrade with ipkg update; ipkg upgrade — reflashing is required.

Looks like sooner or later I will give a try to DD-WRT or other distro.

Nearly week ago decided to stop fighting with getting sound working on my new DFI RS482 mainboard and reported bug in Linux bugtracker. After few days and few patches from Dan Carpenter I have sound working. No more atiixp: codec read timeout messages, just working music.

If someone has this problem then here is solution (until it will get resolved finally in mainline):

1. unpack kernel sources
2. fetch this patch
3. build kernel and modules
4. modprobe snd-atiixp ac97_codec=0
5. run audio player

Now it is time to wait until this will go into mainline.

Yesterday I got Progear 1050HX+ webpad from one of OpenZaurus users. It has Transmeta Crusoe CPU (TM3200/400MHz), 2.5” harddisk inside, Orinoco WiFi card (so no WPA for me) and the best part: 1024x768 touchscreen panel. After booting I got very stripped installation of MS Windows 98SE and played a bit. Due to fact that it has USB ports I connected my PS/2 -> USB converter and not used PS/2 keyboard — it’s nice platform for PuTTy or web browser (but this will be slower due to small amount of RAM).

When I will get free time I will install Linux on this thing. First Debian to get it working and then will work on support for progear in OpenEmbedded.

Yesterday during “Open Source in Mobile” conference in Amsterdam First International Computing’s (FIC’s) introduced “Neo1973” or FIC-GTA001 — the first phone based on the open-source “OpenMoKo” platform.

Why I’m writing about it? It is that SuperSecretProject device which Mickeyl Lauer was talking about on OEDEM. We were informed that this will be Open, will have some wireless possibilities (but no Irda) but it was nearly impossible to get some more informations (you know: NDA etc). From mickeyl’s talks and posts on his website it was clear that this device will use GTK+ 2.0 as base toolkit. They decided to do not use closed source Qtopia Phone Edition but writing own framework instead.

The idea of phone device which has phone software installed and rest depends on what user want sounds delicious for me. And as the phone software was built with OpenEmbedded maybe there will be some discounts for us, developers :)