Palm LD

I have created bootkit for palm lifedrive to show you where palmld port development really is now.

Download here:
http://builds.hackndev.com/builds/Marex/TP1-20070717.tar.bz2
http://builds.hackndev.com/builds/Marex/TP1-20070717.tar.bz2.sha1

Read on for key features ...
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for UPDATE scroll to the bottom of the page...
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Hmm ... Look like it's just one small step for Marex, but one big leap for LifeDrive users :b I managed to enumerate that wicked USB2 chip from Cypress (EZUSB SX2 ; CY7C68001) with USB bus from linux AFTER reseting that chip with GPIO118 (power down/up). I enumerated it with built-in descriptor (UPDATE - I can enumerate with master supplied descriptor), but that means the communication with the chip is possible and Im probably just a few steps away from fully-featured driver for that chip. Testing code is in SVN.

Just letting you all know I'm no longer working on the LD Linux project. A little while ago I damaged my IDE cable by unplugging and replugging it too much while testing dalboot. (It was inevitable that I'd break it eventually. ) While I might pick up the project again later, either by booting off the serial port or getting a replacement cable/LD, at the moment I'm playing around with Treo 650 Linux. Those interested in the LD project, I suggest now contacting Marex or fahhem.

Finally.
Yes: HDD, touchscreen.
No: sound, keypad.
Will upload later tonight after cleanup. Thank cris.

A LifeDrive garux prc with ezhikov's cmd.c direction pad command typer. The HDD module is included in the initrd but not installed by default, insmod /palmld_ide.ko to use it.

Update: Added backspace and several extra characters to cmd.

So your LifeDrive HDD has died or you've somehow managed to wipe it? These instructions explain (AT YOUR OWN RISK) how to reinstall PalmOS manually. This will definitely void your warranty, so you're best off getting Palm to do it instead if you can.

Note: This article is now maintained on the wiki. Try there fore newer versions.

Edit: You can use this technique and customise the ROM zip. For example I just fully removed that 'AddIt' program.

Well, I figured out how to mount the FAT32 data partition. It doesn't seem always work correctly though, I'm wondering whether it's got something to do with the IDE drivers which are still reporting 'lost interrupt' every now and then when transferring large (around >3mb) files. It seems to get there in the end though. I'll have a play around but there's nothing obvious I can think of to fix it. Might just have to settle for adjusting the IDE code so it retries quicker.

Touchscreen driver is working again now so I'll try and put together a garux and rootfs image for everyone to play with. Don't expect too much though, it looks like it could be slower then SD card until we can sort these interrupt problems out.

I've made a very simple demo prc with a working IDE driver. All it does is run fdisk -lu /dev/hda which simply prints out the partition table. I'd really appreciate it if anyone who tries this could reply with the 'start' and 'end' numbers for each partition. Please also tell me whether you've installed the LifeDrive 2.0 update or not. I need to make sure all the drives are setup exactly the same, so that they can be safely repartitioned.

Well it looks like my trick worked. I put the microdrive into my PC and resized the data partition 128mb smaller (using standard Linux fdisk). Then created a fourth partition (ext2) in the freed up space and unpacked GPE into it. Tweaked the initrd scripts a little and finally overwrote the start of the data partition so that PalmOS would see it as invalid and reformat it. Put the drive back into the Palm and booted. I think PalmOS registered the change in partition size, so we won't have problems with it overwriting the new partition (and that also opens the possibility for upgrading to a larger HDD or a real flash card ). Ran Garux. A couple of minutes later GPE was asking me to calibrate the touchscreen.

HDD access is now working fine, the problems I mentioned earlier were all slight configuration issues (like not turning on IDE disk support whoops!). So now we come to the issue of how to stick our Linux rootfs onto the disk. I was hoping we could just mount the data partition and stick a filesystem image in there, but it looks like things won't be that simple. Linux refuses to mount the data partition claiming both the primary and backup FATs are corrupt. I tried reformatting the partition using mkfs.vfat and all works fine for Linux, however now PalmOS doesn't see anything on the partition and tries to recover a bunch of 'lost clusters'. Hmm.