T|X: The future is here

Ok, may be not 'is' yet, but it WILL be here, I am sure. Now, T|X-men, listen to my story.

Briefly: GPE is now working and OPIE is about the same !

According to Cristiano, he has used OpenEmbedded's Bitbake to build the stuff. Yes, OE, despite prevailing opinion between Founding Fathers here that it is almost impossible and... you know, some of them just can't find adequate words to express their hot feelings to OE

You can find all the stuff in H&D SVN tree and also in 'Downloads' section. Please feel free to thank Cris for the hours of his personal life he sacrificed for us in this forum thread.

And now, please read a message from Cris, where he describes what he has done.

Bitbaking 0.8.3 for palm TX

I've basically followed the instructions on the openembedded's wiki to install the needed software, extract and update the org.openembedded.oz354fam083 tree.

I started creating a machine configuration file based on the ipaq-pxa270.conf one: I've removed all the Ipaq specific stuff and then I've created a package file to get the H&D's kernel from SF.

The I started compiling ... and correcting some pkg configuration files on the road: some sources wheren't accessible.

I realized that I spent the most of the time struggling with having my Mandriva box get all the GPE stuff compiled well !!!
It took me waiting an half day of build process to get several compile errors I couldn't manage to solve: deciding to switch to gcc 3.3.3 was the right decision. Everything when quite smoothly since then.

Note: was amazing to notice that during all this time (I don't really know how long it took: surele more than 12 hours) the temperature of my CPU (an Athlon 3000+ with core Venice) was not exceeding the 39 degrees: good job AMD!

Last thuesday I've got the image generated: Linux was booting but the touchscreen was not working ...
I remembered that Alex faced already this problems: infact on his wiki I could find what I needed.

Kdrive needs a patch to add 320x480 mode and some configuration fles have to be added for the TX into the tslib package directory: and so I did.

Finally I've created a init script that loads all the needed modules as I'm too lazy now to understand Familiar's way of loading the modules.

The system is up and running: but the way is still long.

New Garux

the initrd contains now just a few modules (loaded by parsing /etc/modules.initrd), mainly filesystems's drivers (fat, vfat, cramfs, squashfs, loop, ); the rest of the modules are loaded by GPE (see above)

the devices/files to mount as root and swap are stored into 2 environment variables: ROOT_DEV and SWAP_DEV

linuxrc checks at startup the first partition on the memory card (expected to be fat16) if the file linux.boot.cfg is present in the root directory: if found it is sourced. This allows changing those previously mentioned variables. btw, the scripts checks if the root device is a file or a device an mounts it consequently.

Maybe I forgot to mention that in the last time I've partitioned my memory cards so I have all the stuff into a real ext2 partition .

The linuxrc checks the following too (but probably this is not so interesting):

• another config file with a list of additional modules to load at boot time
• a post-modules script that I thought could be useful to update stuff into GPE before booting

Cheers,
Cristiano