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Linux Boots on Treo 650
nilbog writes "A major leap forward has taken place in the development of Linux for the Treo 650. Grack.com has posted screenshots of a Cingular branded 650 displaying the familiar penguin logo. A discussion has sprung up over the the treo central forums where Shadowmite, one of the developers, has confirmed that it shouldn't be too long before they are able to get the phone's hardware working under linux. "
I'm the guy who was doing the porting work. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here and save my poor blog's comment system.
It was a good thing I coralized all my images an hour ago!
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For those wondering if it's real, I've been working closely with Shadowmite (the Treo Hacker extraordinaire) and you can track our progress on his forum or the not-as-up-to-date Handhelds.org Palm Treo 650 Wiki Page.
We've also started documenting a lot of the hacking stuff we've discovered on the Shadowmite wiki.
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That was a bug in the LCD initialization. Actually, we weren't initializing the LCD at all - we let the phone's bootloader do that.
;)).
I managed to get that stuff working last night by setting the GPIOs correctly. The handhelds.org Linux kernel sets a GPIO (L_BIAS) that fubars the LCD. The latest version has the framebuffer working correctly (although I disabled the penguin for more screen real-estate
You can check out my blog at grack.com for updates.
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We've opened the communicatation channels to share information. There are two other Palm PXA ports already - the LifeDrive and PalmTE ports. We can share a *lot* between those projects, but there's still a fair bit of information to gather for each individual device (ie: the LifeDrive has Wifi/USB off-chip, etc.).
I hope that we can all help develop a single distribution that would work on all three devices. It would certainly help lower the porting load. Also, those guys seem to have gotten pretty far - The LifeDrive guy already booted GPE!
This is where open source really shines...
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That's the Enfora WiFi sled. It's a nifty little device that works pretty well. The cool thing is that it uses PPP over the Treo's USB port, so it'll be supported under Linux with minimal work.
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As you said, the treo 650 has built in bluetooth, and 320x320 resolution. I think I heard about somebody (probably shadowmite again) hacking in some sdio wifi drivers... *checks google* yes, here it is.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
I'll answer these one-by-one:
- Will a 650 running Linux still be locked to the provider's network?
Yes. The lock is enforced by the GSM radio, not PalmOS itself. If you have an unlock code, however, we can use it to unlock the radio for any sim card.
- For us lightweights, will it be possible to revert back to PalmOS after installing this?
Yes. It doesn't replace PalmOS right now at all - it runs entirely in RAM. See answer below too.
- Might there be a possibility of dual booting between Palm & Linux?
Yes. The plan is to replace System.bprc with one capable of booting Linux off the SD card when you hold down a certain key. This way you can just soft-reset into the other OS as you need.
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Most of that stuff gets handled by the radios. Both the GSM (Broadcom, I think) and CDMA (Qualcom) radios are full-fledged devices of their own with CPUs and firmware. The CDMA radio uses GSM AT commands, making a phone app just a thin wrapper over a serial port. It's like dialing a modem.
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The plan is to boot from the SD card eventually. Right now we just load the kernel into RAM and boot from there. There's no risk to your data with this method.
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