Older blog entries for darkworm (starting at number 6)

Well, my poor Psion hasn't had much work done on it lately. Work is REALLY busy, and preparing for my trip to IBM isn't helping.

What the hell is it with American car rental companies that you have to be 25 to rent a car! C'mon! It should be sorted out soon (or I will flip).
I seriously should make that patch for the CF and for the Microwindows stuff available, soon I promise I will. Mr Egger and I had a hard time
x-compiling gtk on the psion, we tried nano-x targets and fb targets, but to no avail. Looks like I am stuck with FLTK (you know how much I hate C++ don't you!).

Anyway, I have had enough nights working late at the office, it is now 20:25 and I will leave this humble place and drive home to sleep.
Today has been another buy one ;)

I could say the excitement is killing me, but I am too tired for all of that stuff.

One of my workmates wanted me to make this diary more personal, so here goes :)

Last night I stayed up till 3am working Microwindows, the gfx routines work now, and I also got the touch screen working. I finally figured out the kernel code for the ts driver, so I can also use the touch buttons on the Psion screen when I get some GUI apps working.

I had to get up early this morning to goto the Psot Office and send off my application for a photocard driving license (I still hadn't applied for a full license after I passed my test a year ago!). I need it soon as I have to use it to rent a car when I go to the US for a residency at IBM to write a RedBook for Linux on the Netfinity servers.

On to the Psion... So I have the gfx and touch screen working, but I need to refine the code for the touch screen driver as even after calibration it is still out a bit. I just managed to get FLTK ported to Microwindows, a lot easier than I thought, and it loaded up first time! Boy, that is unusual when I am involved :) I can't believe how good FLTK looks on the Psion, very clear.

So now I'm off to get as many fltk programs as I can, to test them out. Then I can move onto getting some PIM apps on it.

And for another personal note, I'm off to get some chips from the local chip shop :)

Well what a day!

For all of you non UK people out there, it was the final of Big brother today. I wanted Craig the scouser to win, and he did, so it was cool. I know people think it is the ultimate in voyeurism and should never be shown, but hey, I love it :)

Anyway, to proceed with me devel diary...

After having major problems with my PC at work messing up on transfering files to the Psion with sz/rz and messing up my CF filesystem over and over again I bought it home with me and my home pc worked fine. Microwindows would just not work on it, the screen would go blank and the psion seemed to freeze. So after a swift re-compilation of the kernel it seemed to resolve itself and MicroWindows loaded up, but the usual screen garbage came up. So after messing with the bitwise ops in the framebuffer driver for Microwindows I managed to actually get the thing to load up with no screen disruption. All I have to do now is forward port the touch screen driver to the current version of MicroWindows I can start on coding apps, and also getting gtk/fb on it too.

Yesterday I was ill, but dragged myself to the computer and started to play with Microwindows. I realised after an hour with the magnifying glass that the problem with Microwindows was the endianess of the pixel representation. I hacked a really dirty piece of code to convert it, and it worked, well kindof (don't you just hate that!). The pixels were all perfectly aligned, but the thing is the lines (horizontal and vertical) are all screwy, I'm just looking into where the low level pixel drawing routine is, and then incorporate my hack into it to change every screen write.

I found a patch for the Psion kernel, so I now have 2bpp and 4bpp fb support, the screwed up microwindows display look a bit better :)

Oh, and managed to screw up the filesystem on the CF again, I hope the power managment issues get sorted soon ,as this is doing my nut in!

After fiddling with libc from Debian, I was able to finally compile Microwindows for the Psion. It works, well kindof :)

It seems that the framebuffer is trying its hardest to work, but it seems to swap around the pixels every certain number of pixels, so you can see what it is trying to show, but it is garbled.

I know nothing about the fb device, so it looks like another night of caffeine will sort that one out. Don't you just love reading source code :)

The CF is still holding up, looks like I can consider the patch I made as stable, and submit it to CVS.

I finally managed to get the CF working, a patch will be on my FTP space at SuSE soon, once I have tidied it up a bit.

Well, after destroying my Psion yesterday, I was in a bit of a bad mood. I tried to replace the main batteries, to no avail, same for the backup battery. So instead of working on the code, I decided to give the main Psion Linux site an overhaul, it is here. I'll just wait for the guys on the list to make up their minds as to use it or not :)

Anyway, back to the main point, I decided to open up the Psion to see if there was something loose. I took out the Simm like board in there, looked like main memory and then clean up the connectors, and lo and behold, it worked!!!

So now I'm at home with the Psion working nicely!

I'm now working on getting a good solid base distro together, before starting work on a GUI, nano-x seems like the best option, as GTK is ported to it, and also FLTK, for C and C++ lovers.

Currently looking through the CompactFlash code for Linux7k. My CF card isn't recognised as "compatible" but it should be :).
It works perfectly fine in EPOC, but as of yet, nothing in Linux.
I'm trying to get hold of CIS values to see exactly what the CF card is capable of, and then write that into the driver
Failing that I'll just force the driver to register it as an IDE device (Don't try this at home kids!), just to get it working so I
can start work on GUI development .