I was unable to check my thread for a while...tis a shame given the progress.

I will try the steps posted above. I'll try and add remarks about the posts above.

1. We do need to get a site running for this. I am a amateur website designer with my own server and one DNS I don't use. The DNS is fluxdesigns.net and doesn't really fit the project, but if we get things going I'll get a site up on it and we should try and make images of our CF cards as releases. I have only managed to get the 128mb and 256mb cards working. I don't have a 512mb or 1gb card. I did try a 2gb and it just sits there so I don't think they work at all. What a shame. If anyone else has those cards working at some point, we should upload images of that as well. I've got a half terabyte of unused server space so a few gigs here and there won't hurt at all.

2. The original touchscreen driver in the .mlz (tar archive) was made to work with the 2.4 kernel, which may explain why 2.6 has a problem with it, if the .mlz from Hitachi is actually just a mk712 driver.

3. Things that we may need to do to speed things up: 1st, I don't know anything about kdrive so I certainly won't try and say whether or not to use it. Secondly, if we get things up and running we need to replace Grub with syslinux as its fast and a cinch to install. Third, as already stated, we really need a custom-kernel. Since there isn't a lot of stuff on the thing, it should speed it up. I have never compiled a kernel but need to learn at some point anyway. I don't know if anyone needs a webcam connected to their tablet, but I would just stick with support of what is there right now (as well as USB drives and USB-Ethernet adapters).

I own 4 tablets, and all but one charger works. I think I only have one with an ethernet jack and I can't remember if I found something online that showed how to actually connect it or not. Right now they just have rubber plugs in them and are useless.

As for the distro we use, there are some serious pros and cons.

I (as mentioned before) have had the most luck with Slax, as it is easy to load new programs in via modules. The major problem(s) are: since it is live and module-based, to save any file changes in the xorg configuration it would take a tedious amount of time using the dir2lzm program to convert God knows how many directories into modules. The other problem I'm having is that I can't remove the KDE module and still have Xorg work. No one at the Slax forum seems to know why either.

As for installing a distro (like Puppy) to the CF card, it would be nice and easy to configure. The problem is that I have read that when you run a read/write system from a CF card or other cards of this nature it really cuts down on the card's life. (myth or legend? I don't know.)

I think the following may be a good bet:

Puppy installed, configured, then set as read only via syslinux on the CF card. If a change needs to be made, just plug it into your computer or edit it from your tablet to boot it as read/write for editing. If kdrive works and is fast, we use kdrive. If the 2.4 kernel is the only kernel that works, we should try and use the most recent 2.4 we can get our hands on. (Only 2.4 I've used before was Slackware 11) I can't remember or not if HAL can be safely removed or not, but it may be a good idea if it doesn't screw things up. It takes a horribly long amount of time to load on boot.

Ideally we'd install basic programs on the CF card, then extra ones on an external USB drive. My definition of basic would be: Firefox, Pidgin, Abiword (maybe), gok, and I found a window manager called Twindy that looks like it'd be ideal for a tablet. Its no longer in development but you can still get it. I have not tried it out yet. Here is the link to their webpage: www.naillmoody.com. One look at the screenshots and I think you'll understand why it'd work well. Its not flashy and cool, but if it works, it works.

If it would be possible to create a sym link from the /home directory to an external USB drive, that would give lots of extra space. It may be cumbersome, but if it works, thats great. It also provides security. I have a 4 gigabyte drive I'd use for it. And I wonder if it would be worth putting like a 100meg partition in the external USB to act as a swap for the system. I don't know how well (or if) that would work, but that might also speed things up. And I don't know if you were to boot the system without the ext USB if it would even start when it thinks it has a swap partition and really doesn't.

Let me know what you think. Glad this is starting to go somewhere.

I can very easily fire up a site and get it running, I think I will give that a shot today, then we could all start contributing there in a central spot. (I'll have to get it a domain later, but for now I can host it under a subdomain that's appropriate)

As for the original in the MLZ file, that's not a bad idea. DSL is a 2.4 kernel as well, it MAY be able to load the original driver (it's a longshot but I will try it lol)

About KDrive, it's just a branch of xorg that is designed to run without external files at all (self contained) it will run without any outside fonts or configs or anything. And it consumes far less memory. But overall it's still basically just Xorg (condensed for low memory or embedded applications).

Grub still seems to work ok for booting, but syslinux works just as well... The main holdup with boot time I find on DSL right now is part of the boot process where it probes for it's image file on the drives (this tends to take about a minute to a minute and a half) then the remaining boot is about another minute. If we could modify that probe out with a hardcoded path (Since we know where the CF card will mount, and we control the image) we should be able to significantly improve boot time. As for custom kernel, I agree, rebuilding the kernel on-device will likely build in some optimizations for the Crusoe, which will help marginally, and we can reduce ram usage by pulling out *some* unneeded modules, but luckily the DSL kernel is already very tight, so that can be a low priority mod...

Yeah from what I understand none of them have the ethernet jack wired at all, and the kernel is not even detecting an ethernet chipset, so we might be out of luck (as in it might be hard disabled elsewhere, hooking it up is likely way more work than it's worth... and wifi works fine anyway).

As for distro, I personally don't care... DSL is also a livecd type environment plus modules... I think this kind of setup is actually what we want (similar to slax or some others).

The reason for this is as you mention, flash drives get thrashed (and that is fact, not fiction). Flash drives have only a limited number of write cycles before the memory begins to degrade, and you get data corruption, or poor data retention. But they have practically infinite read cycles. These write limits are in the hundreds of thousands normally, or sometimes as high as a million. Things like mp3 players or digital cameras only write in single batches and maybe 2-3 times a day, so it would last essentially forever, but on a normal operating system writing temp files, swapping, and so on, it might be able to chew up several thousand of those write cycles in an hour. (normally on a specific region of the flash, but that's irrelevant since the flash is now unstable).

DSL or other live based distros have a single image file on the flash, that is read into ram dynamically, to emulate a filesystem. The writes are all made to ram, and flushed on reboot...

This makes for some major advantages with a mobile device such as these webpads:
1 - Durability. Hard power off won't hurt them, sudden reboots, and corrupt system files or edited settings can't screw anything up. They become very resiliant systems (once configured initially)
2 - Longevity. The flash is only written to once at reboot, (or occasionally for saving individual user documents on a seperately mounted home folder for example). so it gets around the flash problems.
3 - Simplicity. You KNOW the state of the OS every boot. You KNOW that certain modules are built to work against that system and they can be loaded or unloaded as needed. Overall it makes for a stable system, that is easy to modify in a controlled fashion.

So whether it's DSL, DSL-N, Slax, or whatever, I think that a Live distro is what we actually want here.

As for your proposal for setting up linking to external flash, that's basically how my current DSL setup works. It mounts a writable home and a few other folders, and these folders are backed up to a tarball on reboot, so they are persistant. But on top of that the DSL image for the liveboot lives in an ext2 partition on the beginning of the flash, but the remainder of the flash card is partitioned as FAT so that you can stick the CF card in a windows box, and see that partition just fine (but not the linux one it will be hidden). So makes it easy to transfer large amounts of data, or configurations and whatnot.

Also about your question for the flash, I am using 2GB cards with mine right now, they work fine. But you do need to partition and format them appropriately, and make sure to set the bootable partition as active and bootable so that the bios will actually try to boot off of it.

Perhaps tonight if I get some time I will try the original midori mk712 module and see if it loads more successfully under DSL. If I can get touchscreen working under DSL then I have a 100% functional system, short of a few tweeks for efficiency. (all of which is easy to do, but pointless unless we can get the touchscreen working).

What are your thoughts on all this?

I will post back with a follow up once I give this a shot.

Well, if kdrive will work then we'll use that. The fast and more efficient it gets, the better.

I have been formatting all of mine fat16, as that is what syslinux requires. Thus, I am unable to mark the partition bootable since there is no option for that yet. Just placing the mbr.bin doesn't seem to work with my 2 gb card. I wonder if I should try a DSL install and see where I get with it. Are we installing DSL to the CF card like a hard drive then changing it to read only after we're done editing, or are we installing a live system?

I did try DSL before and found it slow, but thats pretty much everything on this tablet when the distro is "stock". Same here as far as not caring what distribution is used. As long as it works. The Slax forum wouldn't give me the time-of-day after I asked where I could find the 2.4 kernel, as they insisted it would work then couldn't understand when it didn't. So unfortunately, I think Slax is out of the picture.

I'll try and mess around with my 2gb card to see what I can get to work. Hopefully something turns up, that would really increase productivity, especially if we work on the kernels "on-device". Hopefully we can get things to work via trial and error.

It really is a shame we can't just steal the kernel from Midori.

Hey guys, just a heads up, I took a few minutes and threw up a page at:
http://visionplate.samuraipotato.com/

I'll move it to a real domain later on, but for now it's good to go. Just register on the site, and you can start editing pages, and discussion on content. Lets get all this useful content into that wiki!

If you have any questions let me know and I'll help out.

(I figured a wiki is a good collaborative knowledge base for this type of project)

Thanks!

Sorry just noticed your posts (must have been delayed because they weren't there when I posted mine about the new site) lol

Anyway, pop on over to the site and we can discuss this some more

Yeah for the DSL install I used the "Install to USB Flash" option with the CF card connected to a PC via usb card reader (in a PC with no other HDD attached) It should work in a machine WITH hdd attached as well, but the grub installer in DSL is a bit flaky if I remember correctly so I did it that way to be safe.

Yeah about the slowness, as I said, I found the OS itself to be snappy once it's in X (unless you load too much crap and it runs out of ram, once that happens it slows to a halt almost). But the boot did take painfully long (a couple minutes) but I think that can be tweaked, so we will see...

Anyway, Hope to see you at the new site, Trying to pull a few others together from a few other places that I encountered as well.

The site looks good. That should definitely do the trick. Unfortunately, thats leaves the hard part. :-)

Unfortunately I'm under-the-weather pretty bad right now, but will work on it when I have the ability to do so.

Hey Glasswalker and All,

Great job putting up the site! I've registered but haven't done anything useful yet.I guess it'll take a while before we can grow it and turn into a one-stop resource place for the Visionplate.

I agree with pretty much all of the above. I thought Puppy was similar to DSL in that it also minimizes writes to flash by using a ramdisk and keeping frequently changed files there. I also agree that a 2.4 based system might be preferable because of speed considerations - 2.6 kernel seems to be a tad slower on older systems (IMO, of course). Yet, a 2.4 kernel is trailing in terms of new features - from what I have read the model is that changes in 2.6 kernel get backported into the 2.4 kernel, albeit quickly. Then again, we don't really have a workable system under any kernel so it doesn't matter too much for the time being.

Re CF cards. I'm in the same boat with phantom_cyph here. I've been able to get a max of 512MB card to boot properly. This is enough for a customized or compressed system like DSL, Slax or what have you but doesn't leave much space for anything else. You have to use either USB flash drive for additional storage or use NFS. BTW, I don't think a swap partition is going to make a difference. All these tiny distros were made to work without one. Unless, of course you load too much stuff and run out of memory, like Glasswalker has described. But then you could probably use a swap file and enable it for cases like that. It's not like you are going to do development on the Visionplate. I mean you can - I'm thinking an external USB hard disk and for swap and additional storage, but it's still going to be cumbersome.This is still an embedded system by design. A side note - the connector for the CF adapter is a slim CD type. I've tried to find a way to convert that into a regular 2.5 IDE adapter but haven't been able to. It should be possible though - it's 50-pin, if memory serves me right, and should be converted into a 44 or 40 2.5 IDE (just something I've been thinking about but this hasn't gone anywhere yet...) Another side note - my Visionplate came with a 128MB PC133 memory installed + on board memory. I've put in a 256MB stick instead and it's been recognized without a problem so now I have 300+ MB.

I've digressed... Sorry, but I was just trying to say that 512 MB was max and I've seen an official confirmation on the sites that do have some limited info about Visionplate. I'm just curious how Glasswalker has been able to get a 2GB card to work. I've tried 2GB cards, 4GB microdrives, 8GB, and what happens is that the bios takes a very long time to get to the bootloader (GRUB in most cases I've tried) and then it just gets stuck. I thought it was a limitation because of the BIOS age in terms of the number of heads and sectors it can address. Yet some Visionplates seem to have different limitations...

Well, I guess we should try to slowly move our conversation to the new shiny site. See you all there.

Hey, thanks! We will get things going as people start dumping their knowledge so far into the wiki. I'm trying to transfer the sum of my experiments and such in there already.

About using a 2.5" ide hdd... I assumed that's why Hitachi built the bay for the CF that size. It appears to be exactly the form factor for a 2.5" ide drive. the Hard drive would draw much more power than the CF does though. (just something to consider). I hadn't figured out what the port was though, if you say it's identical to a slim-cdrom, then I should be able to find an adapter to 44pin mini-ide. But ideally, I would rather stick to CF (once we get it working right) less moving parts = less failure points, and less battery drain.

Also that's excellent that you got it to take a 256MB stick! I'm going to have to go pick one of those up now! Mine only has the 64 onboard, plus 64 in the slot, so 128 total. Sticking a 256mb stick in there would significantly improve performance!

Also I just found a source for replacement batteries for the visionplate (and double the capacity of the OEM batteries!) they are about $50. I will stick up the info on the wiki shortly.

Yes we should be moving the conversation over there, but I am still monitoring this thread as well (to help pull people over there) lol.

See you all over there!

Sorry if I'm blind, but I don't see a lot of discussion going on over at the wiki. Anyone else besides Glasswlkr working on anything?

There hasn't been much discussion going on, although so far I see 2 contributors, myself and Carlos. Plus a friend of mine has made some additional headway on linux (We have both been working on it in parallel)

Anyway, things are slow going right now, and with work and 2 other major projects on my plate I have been bouncing back and forth on the visionplate... I will have some more progress to report shortly.

Check the recent updates page in the wiki for pages and talk pages that have been updated recently.

Sure there isn't much discussion now, but as people begin moving discussion over there, that's where it will end up. Right now this is the only active discussion thread on the visionplate anywhere on the web, and it points users over to the wiki now.

Anyway, we're trying our best.

Read through what we have so far, I hope it helps, and soon there will be more updates. I am focusing my efforts on the linux front, and Carlos is working on the Windows front I believe. Also I have posted a page with a quick walkthrough on XPe under the windows section.

What's frustrating me is that the bios recognizes 4gig cf but,won't load off of it! Any way to partition? I noticed under the 128meg oem card there are 6 partitions, but I don't know what tools I need to read the contents. (4 main and two inside of part 4.)

You can use any linux system to partition a CF card just like any other hdd. Windows will see CF cards as "Removable" and won't let you do things like make them bootable or partition them.

You may need to run it through the bootable flash tool in windows first (the one for making XPe bootable from CF) and then partition it in linux. I can't remember now.

Have a read through my wiki to see plenty of instructions on doing this.

http://visionplate.samuraipotato.com/

I've been on your wiki for two weeks! Just didn't want to post anything 'till I'd done something worth talking about. :-)

I'm working with small distros, DSL,Puppy, and I'm going to try Slax tonight. Going through the Linux OS into a IDE/CF adapter. I get the install just fine, boots to my desktop and anything else just fine,(Some grub work in DSL, no problems in puppy.) but, the vision plate dosen't want to boot the card.


I'm following out a lead I found on the FW LUG where some older systems required a multi partition boot. Trying to divine through absorbtion why that would be and if I could get it going on the cf. If it will load win 98 on the HDD model why is it being such a prig about a card boot.

Thanks!
J

Glasswalker...
*Humble apologies*

I'm following the Debian instructions.
Thanks!