I realise that the E3 is almost entirely irrelevant these days, but just in case anyone wants to get one working... I recently pulled mine out of storage and tried to put Debian on it. (I want to use it as a modem.) Unfortunately PBL wouldn't handshake. Investigation showed that at baud rates of 57600 and above, the E3's serial port seemed to be unable to receive data reliably, getting frequent single-bit errors. Transmission seems fine. I eventually managed to get everything working by dropping the baud rate to 38400 (uploading the kernel and initrd takes an *age* at that speed), and everything works now. This might be age-related; my E3 is now years old. A flaky capacitor causing the pulses to get smeared so that the UART isn't registering them properly? This seems particularly likely given that I don't have a level shifter, so I'm driving the UART at out-of-spec voltages. Alternatively it could be clock drift, but given that the UART is on the processor this seems unlikely. So if anyone has an E3 which won't handshake any more, try lowering the baud rate and seeing if that helps. (pblq has an option for this.) ... Incidentally, I don't suppose any of the uboot patches got accepted by upstream, did they? Editing the environment with a hex editor is slightly harrowing and it'd be so nice to have a version which could store them in NAND... -- ┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ───── 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
My development stopped at a controller for Christmas lights. I still have two virgin units unopened in their boxes. On 28 November 2011 12:12, David Given <dg@cowlark.com> wrote:
I realise that the E3 is almost entirely irrelevant these days, but just in case anyone wants to get one working...
I recently pulled mine out of storage and tried to put Debian on it. (I want to use it as a modem.) Unfortunately PBL wouldn't handshake. Investigation showed that at baud rates of 57600 and above, the E3's serial port seemed to be unable to receive data reliably, getting frequent single-bit errors. Transmission seems fine.
I eventually managed to get everything working by dropping the baud rate to 38400 (uploading the kernel and initrd takes an *age* at that speed), and everything works now.
This might be age-related; my E3 is now years old. A flaky capacitor causing the pulses to get smeared so that the UART isn't registering them properly? This seems particularly likely given that I don't have a level shifter, so I'm driving the UART at out-of-spec voltages. Alternatively it could be clock drift, but given that the UART is on the processor this seems unlikely.
So if anyone has an E3 which won't handshake any more, try lowering the baud rate and seeing if that helps. (pblq has an option for this.)
...
Incidentally, I don't suppose any of the uboot patches got accepted by upstream, did they? Editing the environment with a hex editor is slightly harrowing and it'd be so nice to have a version which could store them in NAND...
-- ┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ───── 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
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-- Best wishes Mr.G
On Monday 28 of November 2011 at 13:12:05, David Given wrote:
I realise that the E3 is almost entirely irrelevant these days, but just in case anyone wants to get one working...
I recently pulled mine out of storage and tried to put Debian on it.
A Debian on Amstrad Delta howto posted to the list could be a nice thing for those who may want to give it a try. Personally, I've been using Debian for years, but never tried to install it on any of my E3's, which are running Angstrom, so I'm not the right person to write such howto. BTW, I found writing an Angstrom howto a nightmare due to its instability when it came to upgrading the set of packages I had managed to build and install two years ago. I must had been lucky while doing that, as my consecutive upgrade attempts all failed. I'm still running that 2 years old userspace, as well as booting that 5 years old installation ram disk on recent kernels without problems.
(I want to use it as a modem.) Unfortunately PBL wouldn't handshake. Investigation showed that at baud rates of 57600 and above, the E3's serial port seemed to be unable to receive data reliably, getting frequent single-bit errors. Transmission seems fine.
I eventually managed to get everything working by dropping the baud rate to 38400 (uploading the kernel and initrd takes an *age* at that speed), and everything works now.
From my experience, it depends much on the serial port/adapter you use. I had been fighting with several USB models for months before I discovered that best results I can get with the regular serial port found on one of my PC motherboards.
This might be age-related; my E3 is now years old. A flaky capacitor causing the pulses to get smeared so that the UART isn't registering them properly? This seems particularly likely given that I don't have a level shifter, so I'm driving the UART at out-of-spec voltages. Alternatively it could be clock drift, but given that the UART is on the processor this seems unlikely.
So if anyone has an E3 which won't handshake any more, try lowering the baud rate and seeing if that helps. (pblq has an option for this.)
I've never used pblq, only pbltool found in http://the.earth.li/pub/e3/E3_release_v2.tar.gz. Perhaps that makes a difference.
...
Incidentally, I don't suppose any of the uboot patches got accepted by upstream, did they? Editing the environment with a hex editor is slightly harrowing and it'd be so nice to have a version which could store them in NAND...
I tried once to refresh those patches on top of current PBL version, but failed due to lack of spare time. Perhaps some time I'll get back to that once again if nobody else does it. Thanks, Janusz
participants (3)
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David Given -
Janusz Krzysztofik -
Mr.G