[wplug] Re: general or specific embedded-Linux advice requested

[Vance Kochenderfer]

On Tue, 6 Apr 2004, "James O'Kane" <jo2y at midnightlinux.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 6 Apr 2004, Beth Lynn wrote:
> 
> > It is a Sharp Mobilon HC-4600! A handheld with a full keyboard and a
> > color screen. Even though it's about 6 years old, IMHO there hasn't been
> > a handheld that has rocked this much.

Interesting.  I have a Mobilon Tripad PV-6000 that I bought a couple years
ago <http://www.pygmy.com/pv6000.htm>.  It looks like the only significant
difference is the screen size.

> I've looked at the specs listed on both urls and the only persistant
> storage that's mentioned is a 16M ROM. If this hardware is similar to the
> HP something or other I borrowed from your department in '97, WinCE is
> burned into the ROM, and there wasn't a secondary boot method such as a
> floppy or cdrom drive. I borrowed it for the weekend, then returned it

These devices only really "boot" when you first take them out of the box
or if you let the batteries die.  Otherwise, they simply stay in suspend
mode.  Mine can go like this for a week or two without being recharged.
The RAM is volatile - if you let the battery run down, you lose all your
data and the machine will reboot from ROM the next time you turn it on.
It's a good idea to save your data to a flash card for when (not if)
this happens.

I had looked into getting Linux running on it at one point, but wasn't
sufficiently motivated.  I can bring it along to a meeting if you'd
like.  It might be helpful to have an additional beta tester.

One problem I ran into is that the device can only handle low-power
devices in the PCMCIA slot.  I tried plugging in an ordinary network
adapter - it recognized it fine and set up the driver, but it would only
send gibberish over the wire.  You can probably forget about wireless.
Also, I could never seem to accomplish anything with the IrDA port.  But
the serial port and modem behave normally.

Vance Kochenderfer        |  "Get me out of these ropes and into a
vkochend at nyx.net          |   good belt of Scotch"    -Nick Danger