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@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@cowlark.com | scintillating, many fauceted scarlet

emerald..."

| (dg@tao-group.com) | --- Jim Theis, _The Eye of Argon_ (spelling +- www.cowlark.com --+ original)