WebDT 366 ongoing development?

[patmankn]

Tim,

i used knoppix to dd thoms beta3 on the webdt366. I saw the gamma version, for no reason i just took the beta3 from thoms webspace ( i guess, i need to check my greek alphabet, don't i?).

So does the gamma release now support wpa? Or are you guys using any different wifi card?
Thx...

[tschak909]

Hari did some work to allow the Aironet to do WPA.. it's a bit nasty, and requires a firmware flashing I think...but I will try to talk to him later about it.

-Thom

[darrenmason]

Thom/Jimbodude or anyone that can help,

I would like to setup a development environment to maybe help with some of the tasks that were earlier on in this thread and/or continue the work on the embedded orbiter phone.

My understanding/assumption is that the image was developed as follows;
* Debian lenny was used as a basis for the OS and was manipulated to include the relevant drivers for the touchscreen etc.
* Oribiter was compiled for the new environment and the dependant libraries loaded.
* Some code was written to capture the physical button presses on the system.
* Splashy was used to pretty up the boot sequence somewhat.
* An installable image was made from the above and published as a USB disk image.

I believe Thom was responsible for the above and certainly has done a fantastic job.

My questions are how I go about replicating the above and what tools were used for doing the above.
Was something like scratchbox used? Was qemu used?

I have been experimenting myself but being new to this type of development I am hoping to speed the learning curve up somewhat.
I have taken a diskimage of an installed system (straight from the webdt) and I can manage to mount it via loopback and manipulate to some extent. I tried to setup scratchbox2(on Ubuntu 8.10 host) to use that as a root filesystem but it doesn't seem to like i486 as a target architecture. I have also tried to boot the image file that I took under qemu but it complains about not finding bootable device.

I would love to know what was actually done to produce the mini distribution that thom has done and what others may have tried so that I can get up to speed without all the trial and error that I am currently going through. Any references or pointers that were used.

I am happy to document this fact finding in the wiki if others feel that it would be a benefit - perhaps it could be generalised to apply to embedded development for orbiters in general.

Thanks
Darren

[tschak909]

lenny was initially used, by the time gamma was released, I had brought it over to sid.

Orbiter was not recompiled at all, but rather copied, using ldd to find and deal with dependencies, installing packages as needed to satisfy them, clearing and purging the apt cache as needed, and stripping Orbiter to significantly decrease its disk space requirements.

for development, I used nothing more than a tablet, a usb hub, a keyboard, a cdrom drive, both attached to the usb hub, booting from the cd, quitting to a shell, and manually partitioning the flash, putting a filesystem on the flash, and used deboostrap on the resulting mount.

The hardest part of this, is finding the Penmount drivers to use. Just save yourself the pain, and use the penmount_drv.so from the system, using the xorg.conf I built, and copying the calibration info I generated using penmount's utilities in /etc over.

You'll quickly find yourself out of space soon.

Good luck on SimplePhone, this one will not be easy, and if you succeed, you will learn an awful lot of how Telecom_Plugin, the Asterisk DCE device, Asterisk, and the rest of the system interact. Lots of work will need to be engineered into the system to make this work correctly, because the system assumes any SimplePhone is attached to the orbiter of a MEDIA DIRECTOR, and thus, you'll see all sorts of interesting behavior.

And remember, not everyone will have or want a configuration like this, so you will need to do some _SERIOUS_ brain crunches to work out the UI interactions and anticipate the possible configuration differences.

This isn't a slight to get you off of it, or anyone else for that matter. It is a challenge to see which ones of you are up for the challenge of some _REAL_ work to bring a feature to life. It will force you to seriously think about what "whole house unification" really means.

Are any of you up for it?

-Thom

[darrenmason]

Thanks for the quick update thom - answers quite a bit for me and hopefully will speed up some of my efforts.

yeah, already seen some of the code that assumes the embedded phone belongs to the MD and there are definately some challenges there.
Will keep you updated on how I get on.