Tosa Development Plan, where should dev effort go Options

[xjqian]

As most of your know the 6000L is an odd breed compared to other Zauri, esp the clamshells, where availability and dev activities are high. Hence Tosa ROM version is behind others except for OZ/Angstrom where the key dev. Hrw has the device.

Current Tosa ROM status in the other popular rom is pretty disappointing

PdaXrom: beta1
Cacko: None

I've been whining for a long time without contributing. Part of the reason is that I don't know where should my effort go. I have to admit that I'm not even close to software engineer in trade and pretty inexperienced in the whole thing. But I'm pretty confident in my learning ability to get some Tosa dev going.

For a starter, I'm interested to advance PdaXrom to a stable/usable 2.4 kernel, similar to what Meanie did for pdaXii. (weed out bugs, etc. ) Who else is interested and have time to contribute? We probably need some sort of infrastructure (svn, emaillist, bugtracker, etc.) Could we borrow what's available in the PdaXrom site? Should we get together and form a team?

Btw, anybody interested in a Cacko ROM for Tosa?

I can probably commit half an hour per day for the project after my thesis defense.

[radiochickenwax]

Yeah, I've been wanting to do something like that for awhile. The trouble is which elements to put into the jffs2 filesystem, and that seems a matter of personal preference.
To some extent it doesn't even matter, I'd be happy right now just to get the pdaxrom rootfs to boot with the OZ kernel. I'll try this a little later today, and post some results.

[adf]

Yeah, I've been wanting to do something like that for awhile.  The trouble is which elements to put into the jffs2 filesystem, and that seems a matter of personal preference. 
To some extent it doesn't even matter, I'd be happy right now just to get the pdaxrom rootfs to boot with the OZ kernel.  I'll try this a little later today, and post some results.

I'd think putting fairly little in the jffs2, and including altboot, or configuring uboot or doing a pivot root to sd or cf would be the best bet

[radiochickenwax]

This sorta reminds me of the etched marble experiments

I downloaded the build tools mentioned before:
http://www.tyrannozaurus.com/feed/pdaXii13...Xii13-build.tgz

I decoded the updater.sh scripts from pdaxrom beta1 and OZ 3.4.5 rc2 with the edecsh.c program. I'll try attaching them to this post in a little while.

Meanie's build tools have endecsh compiled already.

Grab an updater.sh file (I used the one from pdaXrom C3000 beta2) and use the endecsh utility to decode it into a normal shell script and customise the script.
# endecsh -d updater.sh updater.txt

Then use endecsh to encode the updater.sh script.
# endecsh -e updater.txt updater.sh

You can compile endecsh yourself or extract it from the updater-tools.bin file.

updater-tools.bin

The updater-tools.bin file is a tar file. It contains utilities from the pdaXrom tools.tar file.

... and indeed the endesch program is there.

I'd think putting fairly little in the jffs2, and including altboot, or configuring uboot or doing a pivot root to sd or cf would be the best bet

Altboot to SD would be my option of choice, since CF seems to have problems between suspends on Tosa in my experiences with PocketWorkstation. Hopefully, the larger SD support with the OZ kernel will bypass the 1GB limitation, and ipkg-link will still work for the CF slot.

I'm a little confused about how altboot works, so that might take awhile to figure out. Also, as mentioned before, and from what I can see so far, the two versions have very different installer scripts, which is a little intimidating, but I feel like I'm getting at least a little closer to patching them together, or at least understanding whether the OZ 2.6 kernel will flash with the pdaxrom rootfs.

Another thing that's troubling me is that pdaxii13 uses the 2.4.20 kernel, (from pdaxrom beta2) and OZ3.4.5 uses a 2.6 kernel... not sure which version off-hand. I think that choice was made mainly because pdaxrom beta4 (with the 2.6 kernel) seemed so buggy compared to beta3 (with the 2.4 kernel) , but there might be more technical reasons as well.

Edit:
Gonna try to work on the initrd.bin files with the jffs2 filesystems next. (maybe later today, or tomorrow... turns out I didn't have any time for a couple weeks, but I'd really like to get back to this sooner than later).

This post has been edited by radiochickenwax: May 1 2007, 09:25 AM