So more hacking on the SD/MMC and I’m still the only one without it working. Two or three other testers have everything going, even so far as mounting rootfs off the SD card!

I tried a number of different things to get it working, including fixing a couple of things that look like bugs in the pxa-mci driver. Still not sure what is going on, but I’ll keep hacking at it.

Other guys on irc have started hacking on other interesting bits, including some doing Bluetooth work. We’re also going to try a custom build of Alex Osborne’s GPE image to see if we can’t get it booted using a slightly modified version of his LifeDrive build.

The remaining stuff we need to do right away:

1. Fix this SD card bug once and for all.
2. Get the AC’97 audio/touchscreen stuff working.
3. Get bluetooth up and running (network/serial connections).
4. Figure out the right GPIOs to enable the GSM/CDMA phones.

There’s other stuff we could work on after that, but those are the number one priorities if we want the phone and basic GPE applications to be usable in Linux.

Once that’s done, we’ll start work on porting POSE (the Palm OS emulator) so that we never need to switch back!

Last night’s hacking progress was targeted at getting the SD/MMC driver up and running. Since the PXA27x platform has built-in SD/MMC support, it’s just a matter of setting up the SD/MMC communication GPIOs (clock, data, command channel) and locating the GPIOs for detecting SD card insertion events and read-only status.

I haven’t managed to get the SD card driver working on my phone, but I think it has something to do with my SD card. One of the testers on the IRC channel got it to mount his 512MB high-speed SD card correctly.

The problem is that the data received from the SD card seems to fail its CRC check. The errata for the PXA platform indicates that there might be trouble with some SD cards at certain speeds. Since the card works fine in PalmOS and the bootloader, I’m guessing that I might just need to add a retry or delay at some point until the SD card is ready to go.

I started reading through Alex Osbourne’s patches for his port of Linux to the Palm LifeDrive and it turns out that a lot of the work for supporting the Palm Hardware has already been done!

This an example of where Open Source shines – each new platform developer writes a couple of new drivers, making it even easier for the next port that comes along!

I just wanted to thank Alex for blazing the path that I’m going to be following here. There’s a lot of work in decoding GPIOs and handling the minor platform differences, but we can certainly share a lot of code.

Using the PXA matrix keypad driver from the LifeDrive Linux port, I managed to get full keyboard support for the Treo 650. It took a lot of manual keyboard matrix decoding, but you can now type into the Busybox shell!

I need to figure out why Busybux isn’t accepting the KP_ENTER key as a proper return. I’ll bet it’s some sort of userspace keyboard mapping, but I’ve never played with that sort of thing.

Get it while it’s hot! I’ve started dumping information to the handhelds.org wiki:

Palm Treo 650 Wiki Page

I also managed to get the LCD properly initialized last night. It turns out that the L_BIAS pin set in pxafb.c is being set, even if the attached display doesn’t require it. This causes the Sony LCD that the Treo uses to go entirely white (as if it were disabled). Commenting this line out fixes it, but I’ll need to add a proper check for display type before submitting a patch to handhelds.org.

Once I have a keyboard driver and some way of communicating with the device (it’ll be either Bluetooth or USB Ethernet) I’ll probably push out a release for early adopters to play with.

After a week of hacking, I finally convinced my Treo 650 to boot linux.

I’ve uploaded the pictures to a page for all to see.

I have a page registered on handhelds.org where I’ll be collecting information once I get a bit further. I’ll try to have something available so more people can have a go at it.

To answer some of the questions people have had:

1. Will the GSM radio work? Answer: Yep! The GSM radio is connected to a UART on the processor. You activate/dial it using GSM AT commands. There’s a couple of pins you need to activate to bring it up, but it won’t be hard to narrow them down.

2. Can I load it without destroying my phone? Answer: Yes. The current method for loading it uses the phone’s bootloader to place it in RAM. It doesn’t write any permanent data to the phone yet, and it’ll only be using the SD card for read/write operations anyways.

UPDATE

3. Will the CDMA radio work? Answer: Hopefully. Shadowmite pointed out that the CDMA radio uses AT commands as well. This means that a single phone program might be able to provide both GSM and CDMA service!

UPDATE

Welcome Slashdot, Digg, Engadget and other readers! The pictures are linked above, but I’ll link to them again if it’s not entirely obvious.

I’ve got to give credit to 1&1 hosting for holding up under a simultaneous Slashdot/Digg attack. :)

I’ve decided it’s time to cut some of the so-called A-list bloggers from my daily reading list. The two that aren’t going to make the cut are Dave Winer and Robert Scoble.

Dave’s been on the chopping block for a while – the entries are pretty much just “OPML this” and “OPML that”. While I appreciate his evangelization efforts for RSS, OPML just doesn’t interest me in any way whatsoever.

Robert was interesting for a couple of days last week when he stopped his Google/Yahoo/Microsoft posts entirely (the so-called “non-GYM series”), but it didn’t last forever and now he’s back to spinning his wheels. At least he hasn’t mentioned the tablet PC for a bit. I just can’t bear to hear him talk about Windows Live for the next year until the next vaporware hype-fest starts.

Two down for now but I can probably get rid of a couple more.

For those of you reading via the website rather than RSS, please excuse the CSS changes that have been happening over the last couple of hours.

I decided it was time for another CSS tweak, but it should be done now. I haven’t tested it on IE yet, but I’m crossing my fingers that it still works!

Update: Looks like everything degrades well in IE (phew).

It’s been 40+ days since I switch off Sharpreader to the Sage extension for Firefox. My blog-reading habits have changed as a result of the switch as well.

One of the big changes is that I’ve found myself reading only the latest few articles per blog, rather than attempting to read all the new articles like I did with Sharpreader.

Sage lacks an auto-refresh feature, but because of this I’m feeling less pressured by my newsreader to catch up constantly. I refresh only once or twice a day now, down from the “every four hours” of Sharpreader.

Overall I’m impressed. The only features I’d like to add would be:

1. auto-marking of articles of read after I’ve switched to another feed,
2. ability to filter out “seen” articles so that I don’t have them showing up in the feed window, and
3. changing the click action to start loading the feed in the current tab right away, rather than waiting until the feed has loaded and opening in whatever tag is now current.

The great thing about Sage is the customizable style sheets. Check out the Sage stylesheet selector for some example feed styles. Note: I’m currently using the one named “hicks” off that page.

From the first posts I made to this blog in 2003, I’ve had a couple of blogging goals in mind. I want to reiterate them to keep myself on track:

1. Post original ideas. I’d like to keep the content here fresh. There’s no use in repeating what people have said already. Writing technical articles (like my CVS-over-ssh and various other tutorials) are a good way of keeping this thing interesting.
2. Be more than a link blog. I hate link blogs – I would rather subscribe to digg or Slashdot if I want a steady stream of links. Links are okay if you’re going to make an honest attempt at discussing the content, but mindless links should be kept to a minimum.
3. Keep the conversation going. There’s a lot of other bloggers out there with fresh ideas and interesting perspectives. Blogging is a good way of getting into the conversation. It’s rewarding to post responses to some of the stuff that the rest of the world is thinking about.
4. Post often, even if it’s not much. No use keeping a blog if you’re not going to update it, no?