Hrw website

SD/MMC for Collie/2.6 progress

Thomas Kunze provided newer version of his SD/MMC driver some time ago. Today I finally got some time to test it.

Result is awesome as most of my cards works now — only RS-MMC from Nokia 770 does not want to behave. I posted logs into proper bugraport and Thomas told:

hrw: fine. so nearly all cards work now. I have an idea what your rsmmc might need.

So it looks like this one will work too soon. New test images for Ångström will be available probably tomorrow.

Tags: angstrom collie free drivers nokia 1 Comment »

WPA in Debian and Poky

During last week I switched my home WiFi from insecure WEP to WPA2.

Why not used WPA before? My x86 test machine was ProGear which use Orinoco PCMCIA card (no WPA support) and I also used Tosa with that crap called wlan-ng (also no WPA support). Now I have USB Ethernet card and PCMCIA->CF adapter so both can be connected via wire or with CF WiFi card (Prism2 with 1.8.4 firmware so WPA out-of-box).

But since I use Dell D400 as x86 test machine ProGear is not powered — I will probably put it on shelf to get some desk space free (there is no such thing as big enough desk — just ones that are not cluttered yet).

But how to get WPA working in Debian, Poky, Ångström, OpenZaurus or other distros? You basically need few things:

• WPA-Supplicant
• card with good driver (so no Orinoco or wlan-ng crap)
• proper configuration
• network with WPA

First I configured “maluch” (D400). Installed wpasupplicant package and discovered that it is not supported out-of-box. README propose two methods:

1. Use only one network and configure network in /etc/network/interfaces
2. Roaming networks with extra scripts

I decided to follow 3rd way where you need to edit /etc/network/interfaces just to tell wpa-supplicant which config it has to use and which driver:

iface eth1 inet dhcp
        wpa-driver wext
        wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/config

This way wpa-supplicant is started automatically with /etc/wpa_supplicant/config file as configuration. This file also contain all networks which you want to connect. It can be edited by hand or using external tools — wpa_cli or wpa_gui (QT3/QT4). Have to check does it works ok with other networks then my home one but it should work.

Then same configuration on Zaurus C760 running Poky — Prism2 card in CompactFlash slot. Connecting to network works out-of-box now. On Nokia 770 all I need to to was entering WPA-PSK key.

The worst part was MS Windows laptop — I had to remove all networks from list of preferred ones, reboot and then enter WPA-PSK key to get it working.

Now it should be harder to connect to my network ;)

Tags: authorization debian dell free drivers nokia tosa wlan wlan-ng wpa Comments Off

Dell D400 - installation report

OK, system (Debian ‘etch’) was installed and then upgraded to ’sid’. Everything is working with Linux (kernel 2.6.18 from Etch):

• ACPI reports battery status, battery is charging without problems.
• Dell Wireless 1450 card works — I only had to install bcm43xx firmware (which I took from Cafuego’s Sarge Backports repository). There is also other way — Debian contain package bcm43xx-fwcutter which extracts firmware from Windows drivers.
• Gigabit Ethernet works with tg3 kernel module (tested with 100Mbps Ethernet only).
• CPU Frequency scaling works with speedstep-centrino module and provides wide range: 1600MHz, 1400MHz, 1200MHz, 1000MHz, 800MHz, 600MHz so it is possible to extend battery life with it.
• Backlight control (via Fn+Up/Down buttons) works — it is handled by hardware/BIOS probably.
• Touchpad was wrongly recognized — it is not Synaptic but ALPS so edit of /etc/X11/xorg.conf was needed. All informations what to change are described in README.alps (part of xserver-xorg-input-synaptic package). Idea found on Ubuntu blog.
• Suspend to disk works, suspend to RAM also works.

In other words — no problems yet — everything works like it should.

Tags: bios dell free drivers laptop linux Comments Off

Collie and SD/MMC support under 2.6 kernel

Few days ago Thomas Kunze wrote to openzaurus-devel list that he has working SD/MMC driver for Sharp Zaurus SL-5000/5500 (aka Collie). He provided patches and later also Ångström image + kernel so anyone can test.

I asked him for patches to current OpenEmbedded metadata and added them later so now anyone can build 2.6.20 kernel for collie to test SD/MMC. Koen Kooi built images for Ångström so it can be taken as start of support for this machine. Who knows.. maybe there will be no new OpenZaurus release when driver will work OK…

My collie (after charging and removing dust) booted nicely to 2.6.20 powered Ångström console image so I was able to test my cards against driver. Only 16MB MMC card was working so I sent two SD cards (64M and 256M) to Thomas. Now he will have also some not-yet-working cards for testing (all his SD/MMC cards works).

Also worth reminding — there is a bounty for writing SD/MMC driver for collie/2.6 so if you want to appreciate Thomas work you can join ;)

Tags: collie free drivers openembedded openzaurus zaurus 8 Comments »

It’s time to buy laptop…

In February I was at FOSDEM. As OpenEmbedded project had a booth there I took ProGear machine to show x86 machine running Ångström distribution. When I returned to home I had over 400 mails in inbox (result of few days without reading mail).

Week ago I was at Pingwinaria. This time I took laptop from Ania. It was Toshiba with 15.4″ screen and MS Windows installed… So big, heavy and without Linux. But I was able to read mails so only ~200 mails was left to read after conference.

After that I decided that this is a time to buy laptop for own usage. It will be used only for conferences or other trips so it does not have to be powerful but small and light. Few guys from #oe, #openmoko suggested IBM ThinkPad X31/X32, one suggested PowerBook with G4 cpu. So now I am looking for cheap, used X31 or X32 (with WiFi, Bluetooth not required but would be nice). Contact me if you have one to sell for good price.

Why not something faster? I was thinking about buying AMD Turion X2 or Intel Core2 Duo to have machine powerful enough to do OpenEmbedded builds but I have quite fast 64bit desktop now which also work as build box so no need for fast portable machine. And such beast would not be small…

Tags: bluetooth company fosdem free drivers laptop 1 Comment »

Linux 2.6.21-rc1 released

Normally I do not write about new Linux releases but this time I have a reason.

commit 7a208463b20e893e8e2074b2d41b8dc09568ddee
Author: Marcin Juszkiewicz 
Date:   Wed Feb 7 22:24:01 2007 +0000


backlight: Add Frontpath ProGear HX1050+ driver

Add control of LCD backlight for Frontpath ProGear HX1050+.
Patch is based on http://downloads.sf.net/progear/progear-lcd-0.2.tar.gz
driver by M Schacht.

Signed-off-by: Marcin Juszkiewicz
Signed-off-by: Richard Purdie

Now I am waiting for battery subsystem from OLPC to be merged into mainline — ProGear AC/battery support is in my queue.

Tags: free drivers progear 1 Comment »