Hi Wolfgang,
Am 25.08.2009 um 14:14 schrieb Wolfgang Spraul:
Hi Dr. Schaller and Nils!
very good to see you here...
Yes, I follow the qi-developer list right from the beginning but was a
little quiet because of other tasks and holiday season...
We know about the Letux 400, like you said it's available in a lot of
countries under different names, for more information see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skytone_Alpha-400
Yes, there are many many variants out there. It looks as if it is
becoming more and more difficult to get such a device that is really
based on MIPS and without WinCE in ROM. Some of the brands (Razorbook,
Bestlink etc.) indicate even no stock.
I agree that we should pool development efforts, for developers the
most
important thing to get started will be access to serial console, how
http://projects.kwaak.net/twiki/bin/view/Epc700/SerialConsoleHowto
to reflash the device (can you do USB booting on the Letux 400?).
http://projects.kwaak.net/twiki/bin/view/Epc700/UbootStuff
Reflashing without u-boot is a little tricky but works:
http://lists.linuxtogo.org/pipermail/mipsbook-devel/2009-July/000092.html
How do you build your rootfs?
We are using OpenWrt and can already boot a 2.6.31 kernel on the
NanoNote.
See
http://github.com/lindnermarek/openwrt-x-burst/commits/x-burst
If you point people to the Letux as a development platform, the one
thing
that makes me a bit nervous is that the Wikipedia page says the
successor
has switched to a Marvell PXA27x CPU? And the next switch to a Chinese
ARM CPU (Jade Tech Z228) is already announced. Is that true?
Yes, that is true. It comes from the business model behind. SkyTone
who originally designed the device and some other companies heavily
work on the design and change things over night (I guess for component
availability reasons). So it may happen that you get a different
device shipped than what you had seen as a sample 4 weeks before...
Are you planning to come out with more Ingenic-based devices?
I think we should stick to a stable platform. The one thing software
development needs is a stable open platform and time.
There is a lot of ground to cover with the XBurst SoCs. The SIMD
So far our Letux 400 was a one-time effort to get a single batch of
small MIPS based device to the European market and to support it
better than all the mass market resellers of the same model.
Therefore, you don't need to concern about platform changes. The Letux
400 will remain the same as it was and is... And it is the variant
with 2GB Flash, WLAN and MIPS JZ4730 (whatever else is out there).
This makes it very compatible to your new hardware (we are all waiting
for...). The backside of the coin is that we have only limited stock
of these machines. I.e. the Letux 400 is not a consumer or mass market
thing but a developer platform.
instructions look very interesting, MPlayer source codes already
exist and
need to be sent upstream. Boot time and power consumption can be
optimized.
Etc.
There is even a friend who is running GNUstep on it:
http://multixden.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html
We welcome all Letux 400 (and all other Skytone Alpha 400) developers
to the Free XBurst devices community, and we are happy to be a part
ourselves...
Yes, we will be happy to contribute by enlarging the base of JZ47xx
developers. So if anyone needs L400 hardware, please drop me a note or
go to http://www.handheld-linux.com/wiki.php?page=Letux%20400
Nikolaus
Wolfgang
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 12:40:50PM +0200, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller
wrote:
Hi all developers,
I just realized that Qi hardware is focussing a lot around the new
MIPS SoC. So it could be interesting to get more real Ingenic JZ
based
hardware to active (potential) developers who want to work on kernel
and user space software.
Maybe, our Letux 400 is the right thing to use as a (inexpensive)
MIPS
target development platform. It is a small (7 inch, 650 g) "Netbook"
based on the JZ4730 (it was originally developed by SkyTone and is
essentially the same device that became broadly known as Razorbook).
Ard has collected a lot of reverse engineering results
http://projects.kwaak.net/twiki/bin/view/Epc700/WebHome
e.g. look here: http://projects.kwaak.net/twiki/bin/view/Epc700/HardwareLayout
Nils from www.kernelconcepts.de has worked heavily on a Linux kernel
and is mostly done. More links on this can be found on
http://www.letux.org/wiki/index.php?title=Kernel_Development
Main activity is on the mipsbook-devel mailing list
(http://projects.linuxtogo.org/mailman/listinfo/mipsbook-devel
). Looking into this material may benefit the NanoNote.
So if developers on this list are interested in getting more or less
compatible hardware, please contact me.
BR,
Nikolaus
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