Using The Cl4 As Ebook Hardware

[Berend]

I have the whole OE/Bitbake thing running and last weekend build a few images. this gives me two problems:

1) The standard GPE image is about 20MB, and won't fit on my CL4. Last year there were some opensimpad images available in XXL and light versions. I browsed through the org.openembedded.dev files but I couldn't find any reference how to customize the GPE image like this. What would be the way to do this? The OE wiki doesn't seem to touch this subject either.

2) Also, I modded a MMC into my simpad and tried if it would show up when using a fresh boostrap-image. But the module isn't build. I can find all kinds of references to MMC and CONFIG_MMC but I'm not sure how to 'enable' the mmc.so to be build.

I realise I might take these questions to a broader OE audience, but I'm hoping there are still some opensimpad developers lurking here that can teach me a few tricks and/or kick me in the right direction.

What I'm aiming for is to use the CL4 as an ebook reader, so primarily I'm looking for a decent PDF reader and for convenience a recent browser (JS and XMLHttpRequest stuff so I can create some self-contained HTML/JS applications for some notetaking).
Digital PIM never did it for me (I prefer paper) so I won't need those apps. I've searched for the right ebook hardware for years but these things never seem to break through and very often only support some obscure proprietary format. The CL4's that are flooding eBay come very close to what I wanted, just some software and extra memory and I'll be very happy.

And as for the OpenSimpad project, I think it's a shame it's stalling like this and I'd certainly be wiling to put some time in it --I'm stuck with this thing ;-)
I'm more of a web/python dev monkey so I don't have much to contribute in C/C++ and what else, but as soon as I learn something here I think it should go on the opensimpad wiki to at least show there's still something going on and I'd be pleased to offer images. All in good time ofcourse and first a decent image, but I'm just saying opensimpad won't be over if I can do anything about it. (maybe it could fit into the Angstrom project? I need to ask those guys...)

[fredyd]

The mmc module is built in OE, but it's just not installed in the bootstrap image. just install the corresponding ipk after flashing the image.

Concerning the size of the GPE image, you can fiddle with gpe-image.bb (copy it to gpe-image-light.bb for that purpose), in particular these lines, to remove unnecessary things:
export IPKG_INSTALL = "task-bootstrap gpe-task-base \
                     gpe-task-pim gpe-task-settings \
                  gpe-task-apps ${GPE_EXTRA_DEPENDS} \
             ${XSERVER} \
             ${GPE_EXTRA_INSTALL}"

Concerning OpenSimpad, it's not stalling at all since SIMpad support is part of the upcoming Familiar and Angstrom releases. I'm maintaining the 2.4 kernels (coming next: better wireless and VPN support), and the 2.6 kernel needs a bit more work to be fully usable. To summarize, OpenSimpad is not a distribution anymore, it's just the name of the 2.4 kernel, and it inherits all the developments made on Familiar and Angstrom.

[Berend]

Thanks for the pointers, I'll have another go at it.

About opensimpad, good to hear that. I read about everything getting into Angstrom and Familiar but I was a bit afraid that since the simpad userbase seemed -to me at least- to be fading away that support would silently be left behind in some old branch. But now I guess what remains of opensimpad is the website with some docs/how-to's.