Well, I've survived my stag weekend. I did have some fears I might not. TFM did a great job of arranging it; 15 of us ended up in 2 cottages at Park Farm Barns (most of us for Friday and Saturday, with a handful of us there until today). Paintball was played at Skirmish. Much meat was eaten (possibly the largest piece of beef I've seen up close). Much alcohol was consumed. And my arteries are going to take a while to recover from 3 mornings in a row of fried bacon for breakfast. All good though. Thanks to everyone who managed to make it.

I am familiar with the Xanadux project which is working on porting Linux to various WinCE based smartphones. However I'm not aware of anyone doing the same for Nokia or SonyEricsson phones. Are there no such projects or have I just not found them? I'd have thought phones running Series 60 were likely candidates to have other neat stuff ported. Is this not being done because it's harder to get into Symbian, or is it not being done because Symbian is much more functional than WinCE?

I spent the past couple of days at LinuxWorld UK, mostly on the Debian stand. I'm not sure I'd go as a punter these days; I don't think a lot changes year on year. However I do think it's good for us to turn up and show our faces so people can come and talk to us and realise we're wonderful people. Plus it's always good to see people I haven't seen in ages.

We sold a lot of T-Shirts (even the red one with yellow writing that looks like something Phil would come up with after too much vodka [I bought one of these myself]). We didn't sell a lot of DVDs, but that's been happening since broadband became more pervasive. There were a reasonable number of people who just stopped to chat (shouting "Use Debian, it's great!" at people as they walked by was surprisingly effective). Lots of questions about how we felt about Ubuntu. Not really many about why we hadn't released yet which is a change!

I also found a new toy I think I want; the Nokia E70. Steve has one of these and it looks pretty sweet; 3G+WLAN, a keyboard and a screen that, while not that big, manages a pretty good PuTTY session in 80x43 or so. And all of this in something not that much larger than a normal phone. That's appealing. I'd been sort of lusting after an HTC TyTN, but reports of poor reliability have put me off. And Simon has put me off the 9300i by saying it's quite slow as a phone.

Finally, courtesy of Trexy, I present a new, work safe, goat sex:

And now I will spend the next week sleeping I think.

Tony tagged 2.6.18-omap1 yesterday. This has nearly got to the point where all the "easy" devices on the E3 are supported out of the box. I need to clean up the modem bits for inclusion - currently it's done with early_serial_setup which I'm sure is wrong but my attempts to do it with a platform_device haven't met with much success. I'm sure half an hour with a hammer will do the trick.

That basically leaves the more intrusive or non fully functional drivers; Matt Callow's mailboard and camera work and Mark Underwood's sound driver (unfortunately still not complete :( ). All of these are currently against 2.6.16. I tried to get the sound working under 2.6.17 but didn't get anywhere with it. If I can manage to find some time I'll try again with 2.6.18.

Not that I have a lot of time at present it seems. Spent last week in Northern Ireland, Cambridge, London and Reading and this week I've got LinuxWorld (I'll be on the Debian stand, of course). I've had a bunch of things to try in terms of getting SA1110 UDC working for the Balloon which should probably take priority over the E3 sound. Meh. Can I have more hours in the day? Or a teleport would probably be better.

Way back at Steve’s Debian BBQ I had a late night conversation with Wookey about the fun I’d had hacking on the E3 and how gradually getting more bits into the linux-omap or mainline kernel gave me a bit of a kick. And he talked about the Balloon and how someone who would do that for it would be quite useful.

I, of course, foolishly volunteered if presented with suitable hardware. The next day came and I thought no more of it until the following weekend when I got handed a board. Ooops. I got stuck for a long while fighting with the major NAND changes in 2.6.18, but thanks to Vitaly Wool’s YAFFS cleanups eventually got a board that would boot and mount the rootfs. This allowed me to start looking at drivers.

Today I finally got USB host working. In addition I have the CF slot working (and have had networking going with my CF network card [which doesn’t bloody get detected if the dongle isn’t inserted. Grrrr.]). As far as I’m concerned that’s significant progress (even if it’s largely been as a result of being able to use Nick Bane’s existing work).

The main item left to get working on my board is USB client (sa11x0-udc), so that’s my next task. I have a driver but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to want to work. I shall kick it. I’ve also got LED and I2C drivers to write, but they should be a doddle.