[Nottingham] Familiar Linux on an IPaq

[Moses O'Hara]

Hi everyone, been a while since I posted. 

I've finaly got my IPaq running Familiar linux with opie . It was quite an ordeal, you have to overwrite the existing boot manager which gives you the ability to X-Modem the linux base files up to the mobile. 

A few disconcerting features of the boot manager is, you flash the bootstrap, the ipaq restarts with nothing coming up on the screen but the backlight. A few brown trouser changes later and I got the x-modem hyperterminal session working (has to be x-modem connection as usb hasn't been brought up at that point, hopefully something which will come later). 

You then have to issue the boot command via the pc's terminal connection and linux starts to boot up. Something appears on the screen finally, alas the joys of anal resbite!

The distro's fairly good though alot of the ipaq's features ( the gimiky ones) aren't working out the box. Hopefully I'll have the chance to bring it down to the next social so everyone can have a finger. 

For those interested, it took about 1/2 an hour to transfer the distro's 15MB image. Theres no graphical web browser as standard and the usb connection once the distro's installed is a bit of a pain (work in progress) though the 802.11b worked out the box. 

One quite worrying event was when the ipaq is shutdown / turned off, when it came back up it just gave the backlight and nothing on the screen. All of a sudden it started working properly and came back up again into linux on a power cycle, just one of those things i guess. 

Any questions a welcomed grately. 

Cheers, 

Moses.


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