September 2006 - e3-hacking

[PATCH] Add support for Amstrad Delta (E3).
by Jonathan McDowell 08 Oct '06

08 Oct '06

The attached patch adds support for the Amstrad Delta (E3) Videophone. Currently the Amstrad primary bootloader provides the main hardware initialisation and then loads u-boot to handle user interaction and kernel loading. I'd appreciate any comments you may have. Patch is against current git. J. -- noodles is realistic with a few teen issues This .sig brought to you by the letter Y and the number 42 Product of the Republic of HuggieTag

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V2 release - Handling bad NAND blocks
by Matt Callow 04 Oct '06

04 Oct '06

I thought I'd give the release a try (up to now I've always copied the kernel over serial and used nfs root) but it appears that I have some bad blocks in the NAND on my device: Found ldr.img Erasing /dev/mtd3 Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 0 -- 0 % complete. Skipping bad block at 0x00004000 Skipping bad block at 0x00008000 Erasing 16 Kibyte @ c000 -- 18 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 10000 -- 25 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 14000 -- 31 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 18000 -- 37 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 1c000 -- 43 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 20000 -- 50 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 24000 -- 56 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 28000 -- 62 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 2c000 -- 68 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 30000 -- 75 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 34000 -- 81 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 38000 -- 87 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 3c000 -- 93 % complete. Writing ldr.img to /dev/mtd3 end_request: I/O error, dev mtdblock3, sector 32 dd: /dev/mtdblock3: Input/output error Is it possible to move ldr further down in /dev/mtd3 ? I tried this using dd if=/media/sda1/ldr.img of=/dev/mtdblock3 bs=16384 seek=3 that seemed to write OK, but the e3 wont boot of the nand yet. I get an error about missing kernel params, which repeats continuously. Anyone got any ideas? Matt

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Howto Guide?
by Simon Stirrat 02 Oct '06

02 Oct '06

hi, has anyone writen a 'How to Guide' for installing on these devices. I would love to try all this stuff out but i've never build a linux distro before. I am curently running Ubuntu Dapper on my PC. Also what other Hardware do i need for it. USB-to-Ethernet connection ETC. thanks in advance -- Simon Stirrat streetmagix(a)gmail.com

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RE: [E3-hacking] v2 release
by Alex.Goodyear＠jet.uk 02 Oct '06

02 Oct '06

I've also got the V2 release working without any major problems (a fantastic achievement, thanks Jonathan et al). I have a few observations and questions that may help others. I did stop the NAND backup process because it was incredibly slow. "top" showed that the system wasn't using much CPU but the load was over 2.0 Using "df" also revealed that the USB stick was only having 16 bytes written to it every second or so. The E3 keyboard is mapped as a standard desktop keyboard so most shifted characters are wrong and symbol-shift characters are ignored. I replaced the supplied 2.6.16 uImage with the one from the 2.6.17 directory in the hope that the keyboard mappings would be fixed. It worked but it only provided a shell login for the serial connection unlike the 2.6.16 image which provides both a serial and an onboard E3 login. The copying of the Linux image from NAND seems slow, I recall some discussion about this being fixed within u-boot. Does the copy of u-boot in the V2 release contain this fix? My USB-to-Ethernet dongle is a Psion Dacom Gold Port using the Kawasaki LSI KL5KUSB101B chip which was detected by both the 2.6.16 and 2.6.17 kernels (it uses the kaweth device driver). Upon connection it reports some "rx-16" problem or other but it works fine. Again, thanks to everyone involved in contributing to this project, Alex. > -----Original Message----- > From: e3-hacking-bounces(a)earth.li [mailto:e3-hacking-bounces@earth.li] On > Behalf Of David Given > Sent: 19 September 2006 23:40 > To: Discussion of the Amstrad E3 emailer hardware/software > Subject: [E3-hacking] v2 release > > I've just given the v2 release a try --- impressive stuff! The download > Just > Worked. No more faffing around with serial downloads every time I want to > boot > the thing, hurrah. It's also really nice to have a real boot loader. Plus, > thanks to the magic of jffs2 there's an astonishing amount of root file > system > space... > > A few minor quibbles: > > - Busybox's loadkmap is very stupid and can't cope with my ASCII keymap > table. > (It also wants to refer to the obsolete /dev/vc/0.) I can't figure out how > to > compile my keymap, or even if such a concept makes sense these days. > > - Is there an ipkg feed available where I can get iwconfig? I've tried the > same feed that I use for my NSLU2, but it's not compatible. The statically > compiled version I built myself (I couldn't make a dynamically compiled > version to work) is over five megabytes. Ho hum. > > - OpenEmbedded wants to rebuild monotone's roster cache. Apparently this > is > going to take about four hours. > > Currently I'm trying to build a working zd1201 driver for wireless > networking, > which is involving some entertaining messing around with cross compilers - > -- > it's suprisingly hard to find a decent cross compiler package for Debian. > > -- > +- David Given --McQ-+ "Gaping from its single obling socket was > | dg(a)cowlark.com | scintillating, many fauceted scarlet emerald..." > | (dg(a)tao-group.com) | --- Jim Theis, _The Eye of Argon_ (spelling > +- www.cowlark.com --+ original) >

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Re: e3-hacking Digest, Vol 16, Issue 18
by yragretsil＠aol.com 01 Oct '06

01 Oct '06

REMOVE ME FROM MAILING LIST -----Original Message----- From: e3-hacking-request(a)earth.li To: e3-hacking(a)earth.li Sent: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12.00PM Subject: e3-hacking Digest, Vol 16, Issue 18 Send e3-hacking mailing list submissions to e3-hacking(a)earth.li To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://www.earth.li/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/e3-hacking or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to e3-hacking-request(a)earth.li You can reach the person managing the list at e3-hacking-owner(a)earth.li When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of e3-hacking digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: v2 release (Jonathan McDowell) 2. Re: v2 release (Piotr Michniewski) 3. Re: v2 release (Jonathan McDowell) 4. V2 release - Handling bad NAND blocks (Matt Callow) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 09:10:55 +0100 From: Jonathan McDowell <noodles(a)earth.li> Subject: Re: [E3-hacking] v2 release To: e3-hacking(a)earth.li Message-ID: <20060929081055.GL29608(a)earth.li> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii On Tue, Sep 26, 2006 at 06:13:54PM +0100, Alex Goodyear wrote: > I've also got the V2 release working without any major problems (a > fantastic achievement, thanks Jonathan et al). I have a few > observations and questions that may help others. > > I did stop the NAND backup process because it was incredibly slow. > "top" showed that the system wasn't using much CPU but the load was > over 2.0 Using "df" also revealed that the USB stick was only having > 16 bytes written to it every second or so. > > The E3 keyboard is mapped as a standard desktop keyboard so most > shifted characters are wrong and symbol-shift characters are ignored. There was a new keymap posted to the list by David Given a while back, though I had meant to update the one in the driver itself. > I replaced the supplied 2.6.16 uImage with the one from the 2.6.17 > directory in the hope that the keyboard mappings would be fixed. It > worked but it only provided a shell login for the serial connection > unlike the 2.6.16 image which provides both a serial and an onboard E3 > login. 2.6.16 is the one that supports most things; later kernels gradually get more of the devices supported by mainline linux-omap rather than having to be patched, but both the keyboard and sound drivers weren't written by me so they tend to end up last on my list of things to forward port. I'm hoping to find some time to get a 2.6.18 kernel up and running in the next week or two, along with the diminishing patch set. > The copying of the Linux image from NAND seems slow, I recall some > discussion about this being fixed within u-boot. Does the copy of > u-boot in the V2 release contain this fix? No, the version in V2 is 1.4, but there's a patch against uboot git that adds support but also speeds up the Linux image loading. J. -- Synonym: word used when you can't spell the one you want This .sig brought to you by the letter Z and the number 48 Product of the Republic of HuggieTag ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 11:03:05 +0200 From: "Piotr Michniewski" <pmichniewski(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: [E3-hacking] v2 release To: "Discussion of the Amstrad E3 emailer hardware/software" <e3-hacking(a)earth.li> Message-ID: <63c5d7e40609290203o663322e6wa85ee9bd00f4daa(a)mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > No, the version in V2 is 1.4, but there's a patch against uboot git that > adds support but also speeds up the Linux image loading. Umm... Where would that patch be ? :) I hope it's not u-boot-amsdelta-20060519.diff, because it made no difference for me :( -- Piotr Michniewski ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 10:08:56 +0100 From: Jonathan McDowell <noodles(a)earth.li> Subject: Re: [E3-hacking] v2 release To: e3-hacking(a)earth.li Message-ID: <20060929090856.GO29608(a)earth.li> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 11:03:05AM +0200, Piotr Michniewski wrote: > >No, the version in V2 is 1.4, but there's a patch against uboot git that > >adds support but also speeds up the Linux image loading. > > Umm... Where would that patch be ? :) > > I hope it's not u-boot-amsdelta-20060519.diff, because it made no > difference for me :( http://www.earth.li/pipermail/e3-hacking/2006-June/000537.html J. -- Web [ No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun. ] site: http:// [ ] Made by www.earth.li/~noodles/ [ ] HuggieTag 0.0.23 ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 11:27:34 +0100 From: Matt Callow <mc-lists(a)tesco.net> Subject: [E3-Hacking] V2 release - Handling bad NAND blocks To: Discussion of the Amstrad E3 emailer hardware/software <e3-hacking(a)earth.li> Message-ID: <451CF516.4000900(a)tesco.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed I thought I'd give the release a try (up to now I've always copied the kernel over serial and used nfs root) but it appears that I have some bad blocks in the NAND on my device: Found ldr.img Erasing /dev/mtd3 Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 0 -- 0 % complete. Skipping bad block at 0x00004000 Skipping bad block at 0x00008000 Erasing 16 Kibyte @ c000 -- 18 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 10000 -- 25 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 14000 -- 31 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 18000 -- 37 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 1c000 -- 43 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 20000 -- 50 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 24000 -- 56 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 28000 -- 62 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 2c000 -- 68 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 30000 -- 75 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 34000 -- 81 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 38000 -- 87 % complete.Erasing 16 Kibyte @ 3c000 -- 93 % complete. Writing ldr.img to /dev/mtd3 end_request: I/O error, dev mtdblock3, sector 32 dd: /dev/mtdblock3: Input/output error Is it possible to move ldr further down in /dev/mtd3 ? I tried this using dd if=/media/sda1/ldr.img of=/dev/mtdblock3 bs=16384 seek=3 that seemed to write OK, but the e3 wont boot of the nand yet. I get an error about missing kernel params, which repeats continuously. Anyone got any ideas? Matt ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ e3-hacking mailing list e3-hacking(a)earth.li http://www.earth.li/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/e3-hacking End of e3-hacking Digest, Vol 16, Issue 18 ******************************************

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Re: OpenEmbedded woes
by Brendan Berney 26 Sep '06

26 Sep '06

Hi David, I had this too. You need to add the following to the distro/amsdelta-oe.conf file (or whatever you're using for that): PREFERRED_PROVIDER_task-bootstrap = "task-bootstrap" Also, you may need to build your uImage seperately by doing bitbake u-boot before you do any other builds. I have so far managed to get an OE system and footfs to boot with a command line. I still cannot get Opie to work at all however since there seem to be several problems with bits of it (such as bluepin) which won't compile with the qpe-mt library due to incompatibilities with the vtable entries therein. I have read that a static build is possible but have been unable to get this to work. I have also tried excluding all these apps since they seem to be largely multimedia stuff and bluetooth which I think may be a bit advanced for the e3 at present... However, Opie won't 'assemble' without some of these and complains of unsatisfied dependencies right at the end (a bit annoying after 2 days' compilation :-( ) Does anyone have an unbroken Opie snapshot that actually compiles completely? Or have I done something stupid with my distro? Maybe GPE is better? Cheers, Brendan

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OpenEmbedded woes
by David Given 24 Sep '06

24 Sep '06

Well, I finally managed to persuade Monotone to behave --- rebuilding the database only took about six hours... however, I'm now finding some odd problems that lead me to suspect that the v2 release wasn't built with the same version of OpenEmbedded that I've got. Firstly, oe-amsdelta.diff doesn't apply, mostly because my version is referring to 'include' instead of 'require'. If I patch in the changes manually (changing to 'require'), the when I try to build bootstrap-image, I get: | ERROR: Cannot satisfy the following dependencies for \ task-bootstrap-unionroot: ...and a long list of package names. Each package will build manually, but shouldn't this happen automatically? Plus, some of the packages referred to are missing, such as amsdelta-installer and sysvinit-pidof (there are no bitbake files for them in the repository that I can find). What am I missing? -- +- David Given --McQ-+ "Gaping from its single obling socket was | dg(a)cowlark.com | scintillating, many fauceted scarlet emerald..." | (dg(a)tao-group.com) | --- Jim Theis, _The Eye of Argon_ (spelling +- www.cowlark.com --+ original)

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Faster Linux boot using PBL ?
by Piotr Michniewski 22 Sep '06

22 Sep '06

Hi, I've been thinking of a way to make booting Linux on the E3 a bit faster. Since NAND ready bit is a bit "broken" in u-boot, I think we could use the fact that PBL copies some NAND into SDRAM anyway. But the question is: how can we "trick" PBL, so that it starts to copy the Flash earlier than 4M ? Because I don't like wasting another few MB of user space in the upper 4M region... Or maybe there is a way to "combine" two blocks of MTD into one ? -- Piotr Michniewski

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v2 release
by David Given 20 Sep '06

20 Sep '06

I've just given the v2 release a try --- impressive stuff! The download Just Worked. No more faffing around with serial downloads every time I want to boot the thing, hurrah. It's also really nice to have a real boot loader. Plus, thanks to the magic of jffs2 there's an astonishing amount of root file system space... A few minor quibbles: - Busybox's loadkmap is very stupid and can't cope with my ASCII keymap table. (It also wants to refer to the obsolete /dev/vc/0.) I can't figure out how to compile my keymap, or even if such a concept makes sense these days. - Is there an ipkg feed available where I can get iwconfig? I've tried the same feed that I use for my NSLU2, but it's not compatible. The statically compiled version I built myself (I couldn't make a dynamically compiled version to work) is over five megabytes. Ho hum. - OpenEmbedded wants to rebuild monotone's roster cache. Apparently this is going to take about four hours. Currently I'm trying to build a working zd1201 driver for wireless networking, which is involving some entertaining messing around with cross compilers --- it's suprisingly hard to find a decent cross compiler package for Debian. -- +- David Given --McQ-+ "Gaping from its single obling socket was | dg(a)cowlark.com | scintillating, many fauceted scarlet emerald..." | (dg(a)tao-group.com) | --- Jim Theis, _The Eye of Argon_ (spelling +- www.cowlark.com --+ original)

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Re: e3-hacking Digest, Vol 16, Issue 10
by Tony Ayre 19 Sep '06

19 Sep '06

>No need to dual-boot, if OSX doesn't do it, you can get the VMWare player >and one of the many free Linux 'appliances' so you can have Linux on your >Windows laptop without the hassle of dual-booting :-) This is exactly what I've done - as I remembered I have VMware server running already... :-D I now have it running again. Cheers anyway. Tony

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