uClibc once again is a failure…

February 5th, 2010

Well after a day of tweaking I’m going to put uClibc on the back burner once again… this back burner will also include 2.6.32.7. Something in this release is causing ubi volumes to not boot. I thought possibly I broke something in the updated kernel config, but after jumping back to 2.6.32 and rebuilding with the same config, it boots! Well I’m going to try a 2.6.32.6 build today and try to find some success.

Next on the agenda would to getting all the manual tweaks I have to do on initial load to be automated. Shouldnt be too big of an issue, but it takes time away from other things I could be doing (not all pdaXrom related).

Well until the next time…

Late

(PS. I’m going to try and update this blog more then once or twice a month, and make that once or twice a week, be it Zaurus, pdaXrom-NG or just plain linux related)

Glibc or uClibc… again!

February 4th, 2010

Well, after seeing the size of these libs, im going to take another crack at uClibc to free up some space and even improve some performance. The toolchain is built and I’m currently building the kernel and rootfs (as I type).

Next topic would be the decided package manager, and it seems like deb took the cake. I’m currently working with all the dh_* scripts to implement a process in pdaXrom-NG builder to allow for building debian based packages. It shouldn’t be to hard to building/creating the packages, but configuring to recognize package dependencies is going to be a lengthy process.

Im hoping I can still meeting the Feb 15th date for the alpha release, but keep in mind thing release is going to come with a disclaimer, because your not going to have a lot of functionality. It will more more like a interactive demo :-)

Until next time…

Late

Spoiler Alert! Spoiler Alert!

January 21st, 2010

We are in business! (welll sorta)

1970-01-01-001154_640x480_scrot

Lets get into the “well sorta”. I’m having some issue with power management being flakey. When I say flakey, I mean sometime the device will go to sleep then never come back and will require a hard reboot, but other times it is fine and dandy. But that has been added to the list of TODO items (maybe I should post a public TODO list). The kernel is now configured with the bare minimums, so I haven’t tried any form of networking, sound, irda, etc(which is my next hurdle).

Working items

CF/MD/SD

Touchscreen (no jitter, from what I can tell)

Console Keymaps (Good) X Keymaps (Fair)

Well until next time…

Late

PS. Here’s another1970-01-01-000635_640x480_scrot

The highs and lows of UBIFS

January 9th, 2010

After many… MANY long nights of trial and error, the zaurus is now booting via uboot to a nice and clean build of pdaXrom 2.0 on UBIFS. It has the feel of LVM with the ability to resize volumes but I have not (and probably won’t) messed around with resizing. First thoughts are:

*FAST compared to jffs2.

*FAST mount time compare to jffs2

*LZO compression is nice and FAST

But I haven’t had a chance to hammer the OS just yet, so more details to come in on that. Hopefully with in the week I will be able to have the “Yay” or “Nay” decision for the life of UBIFS with pdaXrom, but as of now it is going to stay.

Check this out if you are looking for a nice benchmarking writing for UBIFS vs YAFFS2 vs JFFS2

Until the next time… Late

The blog is back in business…

December 21st, 2009

Well, it has been a long while. I hosted my blog from my home about a year ago and switched internet providers. Well I didnt realize the new provider closed port 80 traffic :-X.

Well I’m back and hopefully I can keep this thing going for more then a year this go round.