I'm still interested in this project but currently I have to deal with some family issues that have a long term impact on my life. This has priority right now and I am sure you understand that I can't give any prediction on when I will start doing things again for the Wiz.
The browser in the picture is running on the 320x240 resolution. I had to remove the bookmark toolbar and the statusbar to have some space left for browsing.
I'm still investigating the framebuffer driver for the Wiz. The original module has hardcoded dimensions to 240x320 (even the virtual...
Linux only swaps when it has to so there is no penalty in having some swap ready in any case. I'll try some usb storage soon and see if it is faster.
I'm not sure if I actually want to read texts on that device - well, maybe playing a text adventure while on train would be nice :-) - but font...
Yeah, the swapping is a downer... the 42M of memory are enough for (simple/old) games but multimedia has higher demands...
I benchmarked the NAND and the SD with hdparm (hdparm -t).
The NAND does ~3.5MB/s while the SD does ~2MB/s (linear read times). Writing will be worse but I did not want to...
I did not benchmark the NAND yet (but will do in a few minutes) but the real problem is that NAND is not suitable for swapping. The technology behind NAND only allows a limited count of writes to a block before it becomes unusable (~10000 - 100000 writes if I recall correctly) which is not a...
So I finally patched the touchscreen driver and it works. It's not very precise so I attached a mouse also... maybe I can figure out how to filter it better...
Behold the horror:
http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~hiben/wiz_browser.jpg
(Iceweasel in 320x240)
Iceweasel takes very much memory...
Just keeping this alive:
I have not given up yet - I just rebuilt my Wiz 'Breakout' Board using more patience and planning. Turns out my USB host is not fried - my unshielded connection was just too long... Now I'm able to connect mice and keyboard for quick testing again... :-)
Also I did a...
The problem with the graphics adapter here is that it is controlled by memory mapped IO (and an interrupt). I would need to catch every write in the register range with known GL commands. This could work but even if I get the CPU in single step mode - (is JTAG working ? I've seen the pinout but...
I can start X11 and programs. But I have no input and the touchscreen driver has bugs. So effectively I can make the cursor jump around... :-)
Seriously: It's a proof-of-concept at the moment but I'm confident that I can add many more things. First thing to add is an on-screen-keyboard...
I'll get back to some of the posts later; now just a quick status report.
I'm currently working on the touchscreen calibration which turns out to be complicated because lenny has a buggy version of the tslib driver...
When I wanted to patch it I could not install the needed dev-packages right...
Success:
Here is a crappy photo of the Wiz running X11 on the Framebuffer. WM is Matchbox which seems to be very good for this job. Also as promised 'xclock'.
http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~hiben/wiz_matchbox.jpg
Sorry for the poor quality. The batteries in my real camera are dead and...
Small update:
Booting a newer debian requires a kernel >= 2.6.26 (udevd won't start otherwise) so I'll be going with lenny for now.
Ultimatively I need to integrate the wiz-drivers into a newer kernel. AFAIK even the newest firmware still uses 2.6.24.
It was a bit tricky to setup the network...
About the playing: the keys are still there and I'm thinking of either remapping them to standard keyboard keys or to joystick events. GPH seems to use a modified SDL but I never checked on that.
There are some good virtual keyboards for X that might be suitable even on the small display. I'm...
Update:
I was now able to boot a pre-made debian system [1][2] from sd using a Wiz-Kernel. This system (small) has no framebuffer support but is definitely functional. Next step is to test the variant with gnome... I prepare for painfully slow system responses... :-)
Here is a teaser image...
Well, of course swap space on mmc is slower than the ram but linux is quite good at memory management. The alternative is not being able to run programs so I take slow in any case.
This problem might resolve later; the installer needs a file system in memory - thats not needed in the real...
Just a little update:
I finally understood how to get the kernel to use a ramdisk image. There is some other problem right now and it does not load the debian installer but at least the kernel found the ramdisk and wanted to use it.
It did not work before because in my previous attempts I...
Good news everyone...
I just managed to boot from SD card but currently its only a modified image of the original firmware. But from here I can start playing Debian-Borg an assimilate the system until it is an installer... :-)
Note to self: never - NEVER - run the gp2x menu when the SD card is...
I really appreciate any effort the FSF is doing to get open source or even free software drivers but I don't really think there will be success before the hardware is really obsolete in the consumer market (~5-10 years IMHO)...
Contacting them will neither help them nor me since what they need...
I think my previous post was a bit misleading. The updating process is actually open source (or leaked, whatever). You can create a custom bootloader and
you can also load kernel images from the SD card and boot them (or even burn them permanently to NAND). What is not working (for me...
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