Friday, October 22, 2004

importance of having DEVFS in Gentoo

Had a buddy here at work install Gentoo, and he chose dev-sources
which gave him 2.6.7-gentoo-r11. I have r7. Turns out that he *had to
include* dev fs to be compiled into the kernel. The menu states
OBSOLETE, but when Gentoo boots it gives you a warning message if you
don't have it. Without it he could only use terminals (xterm,
gnome-terminal) in X if he was root.

The terminal (gnome-terminal) that he invoked was essentially dead
and was not functional. It loaded a blank, white screen with a
blinking cursor. Took about 5 minutes to figure what he needed in the
Gentoo forums: he needed dev fs. Quick kernel reconfigure, recompile,
copy to /boot, and lilo execution. After a reboot and loading Gnome,
his problem was solved..

Thursday, October 21, 2004

Bluetooth, speedstep

I needed to get Bluetooth working so I could toy around with my iPaq
(tossed the Zaurus, too slow and the iPaq is far more aesthetic).
After reading around a bunch of places what to do (mostly at the
Gentoo forums), I reconfigured my kernel and pretty much added all of
the Bluetooth options there are (L2CAP, SCO, RFCOMM, RFCOMMTTY, BNEP,
Multicast filter, Protocol Filter, HCI USB, sco, HCI uart,BCSP). At
the time I also changed my power settings to fix the wierd
clock-synching problem I've been having (since day 1). I enabled CPU
Freq. scaling, ACPI Proccesor P-states driver, Intel Enhanced
SpeedStep.

Bluetooth was easy to get up and running after finally figuring out
that modprobe hci_usb was the only thing needed to get the Dell D800
integrated bluetooth alive. But, since this kernel
recompilation/reconfiguration I've been running noticebly slower.
However, my clock as begun to work. Finally decided to take a look at
the CPU freq today (cat /proc/cpuinfo) and noticed that it's been
capped at 600MHZ! No wonder i've been going crazy with delays. SImple
fix, modprobe speedstep-centrino and the clock is kicked to the max at
1698MHZ (1700MHZ rated).

Thursday, October 07, 2004

Multisync

To get multisync to work correctly with Opie Datebook running on the
SharpROM, you have to SIGHUP the actual process. Kind of a pain, but
at least it works. You don't appear to need to do this with the
contact list.

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Zaurus pxa255 5600

So I sold my Palm Tungsten C for a Zaurus. And then I bricked the
thing by renaming the wrong file and trying to reflash. Solution was
to get into the Service menu by holding down "d" and "m" while
pressing reset, then powering on (to get out of the Service menu, just
reset). From here you can restore from a NAND flash (4th menu, I
think).

Nice fellow (stormer) from Ireland helped me out by creating two clean
NAND backups from his devices. One an Opie 3.6-pre, the other a QPE.
Both of which I still have and am waiting to post to
zaurususergroup.com for downloads. If you would like this NAND, email
me, securityDOTidentityATgmail.com and I'll make it available.

Secondly, I was able to get the wireless synchronization working with
Evolution using Multisync. I love Gentoo. I didn't need to download
the plugins for this, just typed the following:

USE="evo opie" emerge multisync

Too lazy to add those to my official USE flags. This built the plugins
right into Multisync. Withing minutes everything was up and running.

Love the unit so far. Love being able to SSH and FTP with the thing.
Wireless works wonderfully. Need an SD card for more room.