My place to share some bits and bytes

I'm on vacation until midth of august. No real work until then.

The OpenEZX wiki was in a very awful state before this weekend and is hopefully in a less awful state now.

I spent a lot time to clarify stuff, make things loook nicer, remove outdated information and make it useable at all. So i ended with 184 commits in the last three days. :)

While working on it, i saw some more guys contributing. Hopefully they will stay. And everybody else, go ahead, fix a typo, fix a link, clarify stuff or write a new page. Do it today. ;)

Here is a list with my major changes:

• Get rid of the Hardware:: namespace. Use categories instead.
• Let Main_Page look nicer and more readable.
• Add some content about flash a kernel and some more development stuff.
• Merge many content from different places.
• Start to rework the project_status page.
• Add product picture. Need to clarify, if it is ok to use the original motorola ones. If not, replace with selfmade pictures.
• Fix many many wikilinks.

The last major problem is imho to separate phone-modding stuff (motofans.com) and the work on a 100% free software stack (OpenEZX).

I hope with this basement other will contribute soon. I don't like to do this all on my own. ;)

It was not straight forward, but with a lot help i was able to flash a selfcompiled 2.6 kernel into the right flash partition of the phone.

This means the phone boots now from my kernel and not the original motorola one. That was fun and exciting.

Unfortunately the boot breaks after init has started portmap. I need to debug this. Anyway the kernel is already bootet and init starts from the sd card. That's great.

The next step should be to fix mtd support in our kernel tree to flash a kernel from another one booted with boot_usb. :)

I know, i haven't worked on this project a long time now. I just can say sorry.

As you can read here, the iec16022 project is still alive. I promise to work on it again after my holidays.

By the way, if you like to donate a hardware reader, even temporarily, drop me a mail.

Today my devel phone arrived. Wolfgang Spraul has sponsored two phones for development. An A1200 for Harald and an E680i for me. I would like to thank him, and the company he's working for, at this place for this nice donation.

With this phone i plan to do all the things i was afraid of with my day-by-day phone.

1) flashing kernel, not only loading via boot_usb. Hopefully we can investigate the AP/BP communication problem a bit more, if the BP is not in flashing mode.

2) Investigate what is the problem with the touchscreen and E680 reported several times.

3) At some later point perhaps try to change the bootloader. Enhanced blob or complete new one. For this step i need a working JTAG setup, which means i need to work in this stuff.

With the new phones Harals brought from his last Shanghai trip, we've a nice collection of old and new Motorola Linux smartphones now.

Yesterday i recieved my copy of the Linux-Magazin 08/06. I was happy to see my second article about OpenEZX printed.

This time the article was trimmed down to 2 pages. On the other hand this way it is faster to read an the information is still inside. I think it could be a good starting point for new developer.

I thought about going deeper into the technical details but decided that such an article is not the right place for such stuff.