Marcin Juszkiewicz

Few days ago I flashed 2.6.17 on tosa (with unofficial OpenZaurus 3.5.4.1 OPIE image) and I have to say that it was good choice. After fixing keymap (pushed into OpenEmbedded) and adding one script into apm (not yet pushed) I have machine which suspend/resume very fast, has working WiFi after each resume and behave better then it was with 2.4 (see my previous post).

But it is not yet ready for end users:

• sometimes battery info report 0% — suspend/resume help
• USB Host module lack Power Managment — need to be removed/inserted on suspend/resume
• touchscreen is weird — horizontal lines got ‘pings’

Tomorrow I will get USB keyboard from friend so will test how it is — usage of external (wired) keyboard with PDA…

OpenZaurus 3.5.4.1 is released!!!

It took 4 months instead of few weeks, I lost motivation few times but finally it is done. I can not count how many times I had to build images during last week just to notice that something is wrong. Building world (all packages) killed dual Opteron machine once, took few days and I had to wrote many patches to get stuff built.

But it is worth it — users got nice system to use, based on recent kernel (2.6.16 — 2.6.17 was not yet tested) instead of shitty 2.4 provided by Sharp (let name of that company be forgotten forever).

What next? Vacations, then tosa fighting and maybe another release in September.. who knows..

Yesterday I got USB Host cable from Trisoft (donated like I wrote before) so I decided to check how it works.

First try was my TDK Bluetooth dongle which I got year ago. Installed kernel-module-hci-usb, connected dongle and it was not working. So I rebooted and after reboot and manual module loading I got hci0 shown in hciconfig output. But I was unable to do any scanning for devices.

Then I disconnected BT and connected my few years old 64M pendrive. Tosa did not even notice that change… so I did another reboot. After that I got /dev/sda1 mountable and working.

In next weeks (plan to have 2 week vacations) I plan to test some more USB equipment — plan to buy powered hub, already have multiport card reader, will borrow USB keyboard etc. And most important thing — test 2.6 kernel on tosa.

During last days I moved from my C760 to Tosa. It is heavy, big and has awesome screen — I can use it even with lowest brightness setting (one step from “no backlight”). Stylus is made from plastic but is longer then styli from other Zaurus models. Internal WiFi is able to do WPA on firmware level but driver do not support it ;(

First day was SharpROM day because I forgot to take CF card from home to flash OpenZaurus. SharpROM looks quite OK but some things was weird. For example handling of QVGA applications — screen was switched into 240x320 mode with ‘please wait’ message on start and exit… This slowdown plus no possibility to switch off that switching force user to rather skip using such apps. WiFi settings has profiles support which is nice but due to fact that internal wireless use wlan-ng drivers I could not get WPA so was not able to connect to my home AP.

Same day evening I flashed OpenZaurus 3.5.4 (OPIE flavour) into device. System boots and works but I needed to install some upgrades to get fixed keyboard mapping etc. Reconfigured AP to get connection, configured WiFi in tosa and ipkg update;ipkg upgrade was working. Lot of stuff upgraded and after reboot I got working keyboard but lost HostAP configuration files (will hunt this bug and add proper fixes into OpenZaurus upgrades feed). Lack of Control key make it not so usable with OPIE terminals so I use OPIE-IRC on it instead of logging into my irssi-over-screen session. And there are two keys which functionality is something which I must find out (one above Cancel and Backlight/Rotate one).

Machine works quite nice but after using 2.6 kernel on PDA for over one year I feel that 2.4-crapix is slow… Resuming from suspend need time to get machine responding, enabling WiFi means machine not responding for a while too… I hope that 2.6 will get into usable state soon.

About one month ago one OpenZaurus user contacted me and Michael ‘mickeyl’ Lauer with info that he want to donate two Zaurus machines to project — SL-6000L (tosa) and SL-5600 (poodle). After some discussion we decided that both machines will be sent to me. I will keep tosa for some time to resolve some of bugs, poodle will go to Mickeyl when we will meet in Berlin during OpenEmbedded developer meeting. Both machines are added into OpenEmbedded project devices.

As donor could not send them overseas I contacted Aman ‘TheMasterMind1’ Gupta (one of old time OpenZaurus developers) and he agreed to get them and resent to me. Last Friday I got mail from customs office that package wait for me. I went there, paid 22% VAT (110 USD) and got box with two Zauruses.

Now I’m charging Tosa — it’s huge but this screen is awesome! Now I understand why people want it in clamshells — Sharp do you hear it? Stop using screen from c700 and move to something new! I also played a bit with SharpROM (last time I used SharpROM over two years ago with my collie) and I can say that it looks nice but I feel slowdowns too often, weird behaviour on application close, handling QVGA apps is weird for me too. Too bad that I cannot test USB Host functionality — Sharp forgot to add proper cable and they are hard to buy (USB mini-A connector) but I found them in Trisoft offer so maybe will get it soon.

UPDATE: I contacted Trisoft and they will send me USB host cable for free. I also ordered one for our main tosa kernel hacker Dirk Opfer (also free). It is good that such companies exists — without them getting Zaurus and accessories in Europe would be hard.

During evening I plan to find time to flash tosa to OpenZaurus 3.5.4 + upgrades and check what need to be fixed. Too bad that wlan-ng driver for Prism2 USB lack WPA — I will have to lower security of my home AP — now it is WPA-PSK but will move to WEP so Tosa will connect with internal wifi. Next I will check how poodle works but this machine is something which I prefer to not touch too much rather — it’s 2.4 support was already marked as ‘terrible, awful’ and we want to move into 2.6 kernel on it. I will check how both machines works with 2.6.17 and maybe will try to hack it a bit — time will show.

As I wrote on OZ website next release of OpenZaurus is coming. All images are working, now it is time to build feeds. I think that it will take few days of work. Progress can be traced in OE Tinderbox as “ewi-OZ-3.5.4.1-feed” build.

When it end I will have to check all packages, split them into feeds and then final work on release will have to be done — rebuilding images, testing them on all supported platforms (will have to get some helpers) and then release. And of course sending info to some of Linux targeted websites.

After release I will probably work on improving Tosa (Sharp Zaurus SL-6000) support due to anonymous donor which donated Tosa and Poodle to our project. Both machines will get used to improve their support in OpenEmbedded derived distros.

I do not like a way how PCMCIA/CF cards are handled under Linux. For kernels < 2.6.13-rc1 the only choice is pcmcia-cs package with lot of files in /etc/pcmcia/ which are just cardctl ident output edited a bit with added driver name:

root@c7x0:~# cardctl ident
Socket 0:
  product info: "Pretec", "CompactWLAN Card 802.11b", "2.5"
  manfid: 0x0156, 0x0002
  function: 6 (network)
root@c7x0:~# tail -n4 /etc/pcmcia/hostap_cs.conf
card "Pretec WLAN"
  version "Pretec", "CompactWLAN Card 802.11b", "2.5"
  manfid 0x0156, 0x0002
  bind "hostap_cs"
root@c7x0:~#

With newer kernels we have two options:

• stick with pcmcia-cs and it’s configs
• use new pcmciautils and udev rules

Pcmciautils way is nice — no extra daemon running, cards are handled as hotpluggable — everything looks nice and clear… But there is something other — list of devices handled by driver is in driver itself — so if you get card which is not there then you have to provide patch for it (like I already did for some cards) or try module aliases.

But both methods has one nasty thing — no way to tell ‘this card HAS to use THIS driver NOT that’ ;( This situation is common for Prism2 based WiFi cards which can be used with orinoco_cs driver (will appear as eth0) or with hostap_cs driver (appear as wlan0). For example my Pretec card (ident shown above) is handled by both drivers but only HostAP give me possibility to connect to my home network which use WPA-PSK for security (Orinoco does not support WPA at all). And all because some manufacturers was to lazy to change manfid/prodid of card from the one which reference card had…

My fiancee Ania wants to buy laptop to not have to use my desktop machine. So I started digging in catalogs of Internet shops and misc forums, reviews to check what to choose. There is a price limit so machine had to be lowend one.

After some digging I found Acer TravelMate 2423NWXMi to be best choice — Linux instead of Microsoft Windows, DVD-RW drive, WiFi 802.11g and panoramic (1280x800) screen. Found local shop which want 510 EUR for it (with 256MiB of RAM which we will upgrade to 512MiB to get it usable) so we will probably buy it in next weeks (I have to start own business first).

I hope that it will be good machine and will not require replacement during atleast one year. Does anyone used it and want to share opinion?

UPDATE: after talks with few salesmans I’m thinking about finding something other — Acer service support is called ‘nightmare’ too often…