Linux on Series 5mx/mxPRO

[oscillik]

if all goes according to plan, i'm hoping to get my 5mx repaired and i'll be purchasing a 5mxPRO

if and when i do, i'm hoping to get Linux up and running on it, I've looked at the page for PsiLinux

http://linux-7110.sourceforge.net/

and I was just wondering if anyone had any experience using Linux on a 5mx or 5mxPRO?

I'd appreciate any help or advice or suggestions on this matter.

Thanks everyone

:)

[nitrile]

I've been experimenting with PsiLinux on my 5mx. Despite the extended documentation on the website, it's not really very difficult to set up as it's mostly preconfigured in the tgz image which you simply extract onto a CF card. Partitioning can be a bit tricky however (and to be frank, the PsiLinux site is quite confusing), so it's only recommended if you already know at least some elementary linux installation practices.

There are broadly speaking 2 'distributions'. One is a shrunken Debian, but it's not shrunken enough to fit onto a 96MB CF partition with X and gcc/g++. The specialised distribution is the ipkg one (which fits in under 40MB), though doesn't support debian's entire Arm package archive, and is effectively 'Linux lite' but is less of a hack. Having experimented with both, I'm now using ipkg 0.3 until I can get a considerably larger CF card :).

Linux on my 5mx could potentially be extremely useful to me, but so are the files in EPOC. While 'dual booting' between them is technically possible, in practice it's a can of worms that I've yet to find a good way to close; booting linux trashes all EPOC's settings and if you've any files on C: them as well. If you are to have 2 series 5* systems you have the unquestionable bonus of not having this issue.

I know this post is a month old, I would like to hear how or if you've been able to get along.

[oscillik]

OMG! you replied to my post!

I thought no-one would reply to this!

Well, I haven't begun to put PsiLinux on my Psion, because it needs repairing (Keys ASDFG, number keys, and Ctrl key don't work, also the mic doesn't work) so until I get that problem rectified, I'm not gonna try installing it.

I am disappointed about the dual booting thing, as quite a lot of my programs install some of their files into the c:\system\install directory. If there was some way of dual booting and keeping files intact, then I'd HEAVILY consider having PsiLinux on there.

In the meantime, I'll have to get my 5mx repaired, and then maybe in a few months get hold of a 5mxPro (or if I can't find anywhere that does them, a 5mx)

Do you still have use of the IR and serial ports in PsiLinux?

How easy is it to setup a dialup on there?

I've experience of using Linux, but only on a standalone machine, unwired to the net, so I do know about partitioning.

What filesystem does it use? Is it Extfs2?

If you can supply any more info on this I'd be very grateful :)

Thanks for replying to my post!

Oscillik

[nitrile]

To sow the seeds of doubt a moment, I've read something negative about PsiLinux and 5mxPro's somewhere, I am unsure on this point but I don't believe it works on them; if you want to buy one for Linux you should research this yourself.

One very blunt way to preserve the settings is to copy all the files on C: to a backup folder on the EPOC part of the CF card. Settings which are held solely in RAM such as EPOC preferences, alarms and the system time are lost, but application settings are preserved when you copy them back after rebooting. There are application helpers for time synching (writes the date to a file on reset which you load from after reboot) but file copies are a manual necessity to the best of my (so far limited) knowledge in this process. I have been able to limit the problem by reconfiguring the EPOC side of the Psion to hold as much as possible on the CF card. Yes it is a hassle and I am still looking for something better - but at a push it's workable.

I've not used them but both serial (ttyS0) and the Ir (ttyAM I think) are reported to work. I don't see any reason for them not to as these devices exist on nigh every platform and are in no way unusual, and the drivers were preconfigured on both the 'distributions' I've looked at. In this vein, attaching a modem and connecting to an ISP is exactly the same as it would be in any Linux whether x86, sparc, alpha or arm - searching appropriately on google will serve you here.

I'll not go into specifics, but Installing Linux onto the system is broadly speaking a 2 stage process:

Install The Psion Linux loader (arlo), a kernel and the initial ramdisk (initrd.gz) to Psion memory (C). Use Arlo to boot the initrd, with which you can then partition a CF card for Linux proper - this is the manual install disk, effectively. The CF card needs 2 partitions, one FAT for EPOC files (as bought it consists of just one FAT partition), the other is indeed to be formatted ext2 for Linux. Extract a root image into the ext2 partition. As far as Linux is concerned the CF card is just an IDE disk drive - which lives at /dev/hda. I used 32/96 on a 128 disk. I wouldn't use less than 32MB for the FAT partition is it can be awkward to shift files between EPOC/Linux considering ext2 cannot be read from EPOC.

Secondly you reboot, reinstall arlo, a kernel, an initrd and a root image but now to the new D: drive (as of course, C was wiped out earlier - this is 'permanent'). Extract the root image to the ext2 partition `/dev/hda2` reboot without initrd and essentially - that's it :). There _is_ more to it than this, but from this point is where you add the building blocks to make it into a Linux system with the applications you want to use, but you do have to be willing to grope with some very strangely shaped bricks so do be prepared for some effort.


I'd be happy to go into more detail if you need it, there is documention available but can be complicated to grasp so the above is a summary which I hope may be of assistance in understanding what you will need to do.