Hello guys, It's been quite a while since I posted on PLUG so let me share with you my recent adventures. =)
My boss lend me his iPAQ 3630 during the weekend in the hopes of getting its IR to work with gnokii and a Nokia phone. Perhaps, also the possibility of developing an application to integrate with our POS system. It came with a 2.18.01 bootloader and 0.5.3 of the familiar distribution from handhelds.org. It already had X running and some nice apps but still looked bare. I can't install anymore packages because of storage constraints. Also the itchy side of me made me uncomfortable running old software knowing that there's something new (and bleeding?) available. =) So off I went to handhelds.org's website and took a look at the latest 0.6-rc1. OPIE screenshots really looked appealing. I decided to give it a try and downloaded the newly baked bootopie-v06-20.jffs2 (10,747,904 bytes over dialup :). It required a newer bootloader so I also downloaded bootldr-2.18.48.bin (210,176 bytes). I went on flashing the bootloader over xmodem careful enough not to brick it. Flashing the root with opie also went smoothly. All of it took more or less 2 hours, downloading and flashing. Now the exciting part is the first boot! First, it didn't went straight to the GUI login screen because of missing pam libraries. Second, I can't transfer via zmodem, etc. over the serial cradle connection because it didn't have the lrzsz package. Third, no pppd binary even to allow me to make a PPP session over serial. Fourth, it didn't have the required serial_cs kernel module for the CF modem that came with the iPAQ, same with the pcmcia modem that I use at home. I may have success over wireless since it had the orinoco drivers installed. But the D-Link 650 was with my boss, and besides I don't have an extra card to talk with it at home, no access point even which was left at the office. Arggh! In short, no choice but GPE, downloaded bootgpe-v06-20.jffs2 (9,961,472 bytes) and flashed again... another 2 hours of waiting. This time I had better luck! :) I was able to get on the net with an iPAQ dialup. Even got olirc installed and chat with the guys (Eric, Jijo, and Dek) on #PLUG. I also got iptables installed and NAT configured. I had a PPP null modem connection over serial cradle from the 486 notebook running 98SE to the iPAQ, and a NATed PPP from the iPAQ to the net. This root image as I've discovered uses busybox, so no more file-utils, etc. and space usage was kept to a minimum. This meant more apps, so I got python, pygtk, xmonobut, etc. Nice! Now, back to the original purpose of getting gnokii working...and all I got was a sleepless weekend getting my trusty 6150 discovered over IRDA. No matter how I beam it, "cat /proc/net/irda/discovery" showed nothing. I suspected a busted phone IR. So, no gnokii... and had some sleep instead. Come Monday in the office. Of course, I came late like... 6 PM? :) I got my boss' shiny 6310i beamed at the iPAQ's IR. Happy, happy, joy, joy! It worked and we saw /proc/net/irda/discovey entries. No more gnokii anymore here since the 6310i has a built-in hardware modem. An "ifconfig irda0 up"... some ppp config using /dev/ircomm0 as device... finally we were able to get GPRS working! Yehey! :) (BTW, I was also happy to know that the 6150 IR wasn't busted because I still got it to work with 2 player snake with a 6210. Maybe it's just not compatible with the iPAQ...) Now came another toy, an Ambicom BT2000-CF Bluetooth card flash. We can't get past pskey working here. After some Googling... we found out that there's no driver on Linux ready for this card yet. So, no chance to get it working atm. My boss had it replaced the following day with a Compaq sleeve with built-in Bluetooth and extra CF slot. It works with the hci_uart driver, so we got past the pskey part of the howto, past hcid, hciattach, hcitool, l2ping, but rfcommd. All we can get with rfcommd was to make the phone ask to accept the Bluetooth connection from the iPAQ, make the phone prompt for the passcode, make the iPAQ also prompt for the passcode (with /bin/bluepin which as modified because it didn't work outright). But the connection just waits and eventually drops with no GPRS. We'll try to make another attempt later since rfcommd is the last part of the howto. :) BTW, I'd really appreciate to get inputs from those who got a similar setup work. -- mike at maravillo dot org _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fully Searchable Archives With Friendly Web Interface at http://marc.free.net.ph To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
