[E3-hacking] Hello!

[Adam Ainsworth]

Hi David,

thanks for the reply and apologies in the delay in responding - it's been very busy at work and it was my son's birthday at the weekend.

It does indeed sound like a bit of a mission to get it up and running, and I may just be completely out of luck. It's a shame that's the case, as it's a nice piece of kit, but sadly the money men have sought to limit it for a quick buck.

As it stands, I've had to put my Emailer in storage for a few weeks as I'm having a re-jig of my man cave, but I hope to get it out again when I have some time in the autumn.

Thanks again for your advice,

Adam

========
> On 2019-07-21 20:08, David Given wrote:
> Some models can be reflashed with stock Linux using various poorly
> documented and largely forgotten tools; the Linux distribution is
> here: http://the.earth.li/pub/e3/ and there's some writeup on it here:
> https://www.earth.li/~noodles/hardware-e3.html
> The downside is that that Linux distribution is actually built with
> OpenEmbedded and won't run binaries built anywhere else, which is
> irritating. I have successfully run Debian on an E3 via a USB hub with
> a hard drive attached by simply cross-installing the userland from a
> PC and then configuring u-boot on the emailer to boot from it. However
> the emailer's only got 32MB of RAM so whatever you do it's going to
> have to be very lightweight. Finding a sufficiently old userland might
> be hard, too --- it'll need to work with a 2.6.19 kernel.
> Also, Amstrad eventually locked down the bootloader and later versions
> can't be flashed. If you have one of those, you may be out of luck.
> You'll also need to build a serial cable. The signals are TTL 5V,
> except _inverted_, so 0V = logic 1 and 5V = logic 0 (it's intended to
> be passed directly to a level shifter).
> The best thing you can probably do with one of these is to use it as a
> dumb terminal --- USB ethernet devices work just fine with the
> OpenEmbedded distribution, so you may be able to telnet into (or out
> of) it. The phone's supported as an ordinary modem but I don't think I
> ever got it to work.
> I'd suggest building the cable, trying to install the OpenEmbedded
> distribution above, and seeing what happens. It's not like you can
> make it less useful...
> On Sun, 21 Jul 2019 at 11:28, Adam Ainsworth
> <adam.ainsworth at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> Came across this list while looking for hacking info on the Emailer.
>> It's a bit out of my usual area of interest, normally I'm playing
>> with 8-bit computers and old PC-alikes.
>> I got an Emailer Plus in new condition about a while back, but
>> forgot about it until recently when I picked up a Pocket Dockit to
>> go with it. I just fired it up to see what it could do, and that
>> turned out to be...nothing! I watched the Chinnyvision video on it,
>> and he came to the same conclusion.
>> https://youtu.be/aY6R72nWJsU
>> I did find a couple of articles, although one (where the author
>> appeared to have Linux running on it) is presumably by someone on
>> this list, given the URL. There was also mention of hooking up a
>> Raspberry Pi to it. I'm also wondering if a wifi modem would do the
>> trick, although presumably we'd need to know how the server software
>> worked if it did connect.
>> Without me going through all of the list archives, can someone just
>> give me a quick update on the current status of hacking it? Has
>> someone found a way in, or have I wasted £12 or so on the hardware?
>> Thanks very much!
>> Adam
>> ========_______________________________________________
>> e3-hacking mailing list
>> e3-hacking at earth.li
>> https://www.earth.li/mailman/listinfo/e3-hacking
> --
> ┌─── http://www.cowlark.com ───
> │ "I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my
> │ telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure
> out
> │ how to use my telephone." --- Bjarne Stroustrup
> _______________________________________________
> e3-hacking mailing list
> e3-hacking at earth.li
> https://www.earth.li/mailman/listinfo/e3-hacking