On Friday 1. June 2018 23.04.43 H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote: > Hi, > although there seems to be not much activity here, there is still progress > with the Letux OS / GTA04 code base. It is neither forgotten nor abandoned > :)
I feel a bit bad for neglecting the MIPS-based side of the Letux kernel effort, but I think that for technical and practical reasons it had to take a back seat for me personally, and as you know, my focus has been on microkernel-based stuff instead. However, there is something of an intersection between the above and the actual topic of this thread... > I have finally made the TV-out of the GTA04 work again. It did already work > long time ago (I think in 3.12 kernel), but after upgrades to Device Tree > we were not able to catch up with upstream changes and understand them. > And to be honest, TV-out was not on highest priority. So, one forum I look at occasionally is related to portable gaming, specifically Dingoo and GCW-Zero, and there's an ongoing thread there: https://boards.dingoonity.org/gcw-general/why-gcw-zero-does-not-yet-function- hdmi-out-and-usb-otg/75/#msg178866 It seems that even on small devices with their own displays, there is interest in external displays. It is also a coincidence that I was reading about Neo900 capabilities for this only recently, too. One of my many tasks with the microkernel-based stuff will be to look into getting HDMI output working with the MIPS Creator CI20, which Linux already supports, but which would need a bit of effort to do in a different way, although hopefully not much more than initialising the hardware. > But now I spent some hours and made it working again. Mainly there were > typos in the DT sources we had tried before. E.g.: > > >>> &control_devconf1 { > >>> > >>> pinctrl-name = "default"; > > > > ^^^ here is the bug: this property must be called "pinctrl-names". > > And after finally recognizing that the video cable was broken overnight > (it was still working yesterday) and adding some "ti,invert-polarity;" the > TVout of the GTA04 works again :) I think that device tree sacrifices reliability for flexibility, which is amusing (albeit not after a long debugging session, I'm sure) given that it comes from a community who have probably derided dynamic languages and things like XML. Maybe there needs to be a tool to validate device tree resources. > Quality isn't bad - so switching to a desktop mode (and taking care of > portrait vs. landscape dimensions) is just a matter of easy-to-use > user-space software... > > So by connecting to a projector or monitor and adding a keyboard through > USB-OTG or Bluetooth you can easily convert your smart-phone into a desktop > PC with standard Debian inside... I think it is a great selling point for open hardware. I know that there are proprietary products which offer this, but it is probably a reason for them to elevate the price and restrict the availability. Congratulations on figuring out the problem! Paul _______________________________________________ Community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.goldelico.com/mailman/listinfo.cgi/community http://www.tinkerphones.org
