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jscottkasten | 17 Feb 2009 18:00
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Mobile Pro 880 Successes with 4.0

I've been using the MP880 with NetBSD 4.0 for about a year now as a home brew netbook.

If anyone is interested, I have approximately 200 binary packages built from PKGSRC 2007Q4.  This includes
languages such as perl, python, ruby, etc.  Editors such as nano and vim-gtk2.  Web browsing with
javascript enabled elinks, and dillo.  And some multimedia stuff such as mplayer.

With the right encoding parameters, one can have an MP4 video playing in the corner of the screen while
typing an email in an xterm.

The developers have truly done some wonderful work on the 880 support as it is a very functional and reliable
little beast.

Cheers,

-S-
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jscottkasten | 17 Feb 2009 17:28
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Compaq C-Series 810 issues.

I recently started playing with NetBSD on a Compaq C-Series 810.  I wanted to document some of my successes
and failures below:

[1] The 4.0 and 4.0.1 TX3912 kernels do not appear to be bootable on the device.  In every case, after psdboot1
transfers control to the kernel, the kernel hangs before initializing the display.  Thus there are no
diagnostics at all as to where things halted.  At some point, I may try booting with serial output to see if I
can get more information.

[2] I tried all of the 3.x series kernels.  They do initialize the LCD, but they all hang right about the point
it probes the flash card (wd0).  I have seen in the list archives that this problem has been reported before. 
It also appears the one individual may have gotten around this to some extent by popping the flash card out
just when psdboot execed the kernel, and then presumably pushing it back in at some appropriate point in
time.  I have not tried this personally yet to verify.

[3] The most recent kernel that I was able to successfully boot and use was from the 2.1 release.  That appears
to be relatively useful and stable, so I installed that distribution to the CF card.

[4] I quickly discovered that although all the letter keys work, almost none of the symbol keys, nor special
keys worked at all.  I did some looking in the kernel source and the problem became quite apparent.  The
keyscan driver is clearly using a scancode table for a Japanese keyboard.  Mine is a US model device.

[5] Thankfully, the wsconsole capabilities are well supported and with relative ease, I was able to
construct the shell script below to run at boot time which loads a key remapping into wsconsole to fix the US
keyboard.  It is now quite useable.  There are two remaining keyboard problems however, the backlight
control and the Fn and Menu meta-keys still don't work quite right, however that can only be fixed in the
kernel scan code table.

[6] I managed to build about 120 packages from PKGSRC for the 2.1 userland.  This includes things like perl,
python, ruby, lua, uemacs, nano, kermit, minicom, etc...  If anyone is interested in these packages, I can
try to get the binary packages out to people.
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jscottkasten | 17 Feb 2009 17:39
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Question Compaq C-Series 810 serial ports.

In addition to my previous comments, I also noticed problems with the serial ports.  Any attempt at using
/dev/ttyTX00 for wired serial resulted in a nasty kernel panic.  Using serial IR over /dev/ttyTX01 only
sort of worked.

I again did more research in the list archives and found a patch by Uchiyama Yasushi for the C-Series 2010C
that appears to fix some GPIO addressing affecting the first serial port.  I have since found that this
patch was integrated in the mainstream for both 2010C and the 810, and is found in the 4.0 release which I
unfortunately am not able to run for other reasons yet.

I back ported this to my 2.1 kernel config and rebuilt.  The wired serial port is now partially functional.

I have no problems sending characters out TX00 and TX01 at any useful serial line rate.  However, I am finding
that once in a while, an inbound character appears to cause a driver hang.  Sometimes it only hangs the
process using the port, sometimes it hangs the entire kernel.  This problem happens often enough on
inbound characters that one cannot seriously use the TX ports for data xfer.

I can't help but be suspicious of lost or masked interrupts in a situation like this.  Before I start digging
deep, I am wondering if this is an issue that may have already been fixed, or if someone has already done some
research on it?

Thanks in advance for any input people have to share.

Regards,

-S-
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jscottkasten | 17 Feb 2009 20:04
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Re: Mobile Pro 880 Successes with 4.0

I would be more than happy to share these packages, however, I do not have a place to post them, and it is a lot of stuff.

We're talking about 250MB for each of the 4.0 and 2.1 builds.  If there is a place to put this stuff, someone
please shoot me an off list email and I'll be glad to upload and post the public URL.

Cheers,

-S-


--- On Tue, 2/17/09, dereck <dereckhaskins <at> yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> Hi - do you have these posted anywhere?  I'd be
> interested in your binary packages.
> 
> thanks,
> 
> Dereck
>
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Ben Hodgens | 17 Feb 2009 20:08
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Re: Mobile Pro 880 Successes with 4.0

Funny you should mention this today, as I just made a tarball of the pkgsrc 
'packages' dir I made on/for my MobilePro 780 (essentially the same machine as 
the 880) available yesterday:

http://benjamin.hodgens.net/files/packages-netbsd-4.0mipsel.2008.10.tgz

There aren't nearly as many packages available as you built, but as the file 
name suggests, they're from 2008/10's 'current' pkgsrc. Here's a partial list:

epic4-2.2nb1
jed 0.99
mutt 1.4.2.3nb2
ncurses 5.6nb2
ncursesw 5.6nb2
lua 5.1.4
luafilesystem 1.4.1
antiword 0.37nb1
flwm 1.02
ion 20040729nb6
matchbox-wm 1.1
x11-links 0.39
matchbox-panel 0.9.2nb3
matchbox-themes-extra 0.3nb1
matchbox-wm 1.1
matchbox-desktop 0.9.1nb3

In my limited experience, this device simply doesn't have enough RAM to function 
   with NetBSD 4.0, even with very minimalist non-console tools (X, ion, 3 
xterms). There might be some pruning of the running processes, but even with 
pretty much everything "off" it's still bumping up against the ceiling of the
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jscottkasten | 17 Feb 2009 20:53
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Re: Mobile Pro 880 Successes with 4.0

Awesome...more toys...  :-)

Glad to see someone is working with the latest pkgsrc.  I'm kind of waiting for 5.0 to come out and make a clean
sweep of things.

My own choice of window manager is WindowMaker.  I typically have about 3 or 4 xterms open, and about 5 doc apps
going (clock, weather, audio mixer, etc).  I do have swap enabled on the CF.  There's lots of little things
that add up to make a big difference in performance such as turning off atime on the mount, softdeps, and so forth.

I do see some significant lag when starting some apps, but when things settle down, it generally runs ok.

I'm curious how you do your builds.  I've had good luck using GXEMUL on some beastly desktop to brute force
"native" builds for everything.

Regards,

-S-


--- On Tue, 2/17/09, Ben Hodgens <ben <at> hodgens.net> wrote:

> Funny you should mention this today, as I just made a
> tarball of the pkgsrc 'packages' dir I made on/for
> my MobilePro 780 (essentially the same machine as the 880)
> available yesterday:
> 
> http://benjamin.hodgens.net/files/packages-netbsd-4.0mipsel.2008.10.tgz
> 
> There aren't nearly as many packages available as you
> built, but as the file name suggests, they're from
(Continue reading)

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Andy Ruhl | 17 Feb 2009 21:39
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Re: Mobile Pro 880 Successes with 4.0

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 12:53 PM,  <jscottkasten <at> yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'm curious how you do your builds.  I've had good luck using GXEMUL on some beastly desktop to brute force
"native" builds for everything.

I've been running 5.0_BETA and RCs on my Cobalt Qube for quite a
while, building software off of the current pkgsrc along the way. I
have quite a few of them as well. It's also mipsel.

I have 5.0 something on my Mobilepro 880 but I still have the nasty X
problem where it becomes unresponsive, and ctrl-alt-backspace dumps me
back to the console, which has a screwed up keyboard mapping so the
thing becomes unusable. Maybe I should build a newer version of X.

I don't build software on the Mobilepro, it's way too slow. I either
cross build on a desktop or just build stuff natively on my Cobalt and
use it on the Mobilepro.

Andy
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Andy Ruhl | 17 Feb 2009 23:11
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Re: cross builds.

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 2:15 PM,  <jscottkasten <at> yahoo.com> wrote:
> I've read the pkgsrc hints at doing builds with a cross compiler.  Although most GNU configure tests will
work with a cross compiler, there's still several that simply require running a native binary.  An example
would be the byte alignment test in perl5 or libnet10.
>
> Have you run into many issues using a cross compiler for pkgsrc builds?  I was strongly leaning toward that
direction when I finally get around to doing my 5.0 userland as it would GREATLY speed things up.

I actually only cross build the kernel and userland. I started to
setup pkgsrc to do it, but it seems non trivial and my Cobalt isn't
really slow enough to make me want to pursue cross building pkgsrc. It
builds stuff quick enough and it's totally compatible with the
Mobilepro.

I have been building my own kernels and userland for the mobilepro for
a long time now. It's pretty quick and saves me from having to wait to
download stuff while I'm doing an upgrade. You can just stick an
install kernel on the CF card, point it to another machine on your
network or even a local directory for the .tgz files, and away you go.

Andy
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jscottkasten | 17 Feb 2009 22:02
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Re: Mobile Pro 880 Successes with 4.0


--- On Tue, 2/17/09, Andy Ruhl <acruhl <at> gmail.com> wrote:

> I have 5.0 something on my Mobilepro 880 but I still have
> the nasty X
> problem where it becomes unresponsive, and
> ctrl-alt-backspace dumps me
> back to the console, which has a screwed up keyboard
> mapping so the
> thing becomes unusable. Maybe I should build a newer
> version of X.

I too have seen this, but only in conjunction with certain apps.  I see this with xv for example.  If I ever right
click to get the menu panel, everything is dead after the panel displays.  It also does that when I give xv a
list of images and try to hot key to the next image in the list.  I've just leaned to use xv to display one image
and exit without doing anything else.

-S-
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jscottkasten | 17 Feb 2009 22:15
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Re: cross builds.


--- On Tue, 2/17/09, Andy Ruhl <acruhl <at> gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't build software on the Mobilepro, it's way
> too slow. I either
> cross build on a desktop or just build stuff natively on my
> Cobalt and
> use it on the Mobilepro.

I've read the pkgsrc hints at doing builds with a cross compiler.  Although most GNU configure tests will
work with a cross compiler, there's still several that simply require running a native binary.  An example
would be the byte alignment test in perl5 or libnet10.

Have you run into many issues using a cross compiler for pkgsrc builds?  I was strongly leaning toward that
direction when I finally get around to doing my 5.0 userland as it would GREATLY speed things up.

-S-
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Gmane