The netwinder project of Jan Rinze.

Things to do on the windy

  1. Getting video input to work.

    Change the system to PAL.
    Getting vidcap to work in full 704x576

    The main problem with the videocapture was that is was switched off. This has taken me quite some time but luckily people on the mailing list found that out. From there it was crawling towards a solution for the PAL conversion. Changing register settings in the philips.c file brought me some insight in the 7111 chip and finally got the full colour in view. A stand alone frame grabber was written by Pat Beirne and has been used most satisfactory since.

  2. Getting the serial port to work.

    Getting the /dev/cua0 in the correct baudrate
    Getting the serial buffer to keep up without losing data.

    The main problem here was the setting of the serial port and the reliability of the buffering. An interface with some processorboards that we developed here inhouse was borne and died when upgrading to the newer kernel. The solution was brilliantly simple just do an insmod serial.

  3. Getting Httpd to work.

    Setting up httpd.conf correctly
    Making a sensible index.html in /home/httpd/

    A lot of mind braking hours spent to see why only 5 request were being handled and that was it. It appeared to be a bug in the accept() call of the 2.0.31 kernel. A change to 2.0.34+ kernel would ,according to Russel King, have avoided many problems.
    The solution was pointed out to me by Rasmus Lerdorf, adding two lines to httpd.conf.

    listen 80
    listen 81

    Maybe 8080 would be better for the second choice but it works now.
    About this kernel bug: Well Russel, I guess the Netwinder community isn't ready to merge their kernel stuff yet. But I hope they will be soon.

  4. Getting pppd to work.

    Setting up httpd.conf correctly
    Making pppd listen to the correct config files.
    keeping pppd from quitting after a while
    have pppd to setup the modem without losing default settings

    Pppd seems to have a lot of settings but none of them were much of use to change the setting of the modem. Obviously I am not yet a linux guru and I guess I need some extra time for this to figure out. It seems another .conf file mishap but I can't yet see which one. later ..

  5. Getting the printer port bidirectional.

    setting up the lp control registers for i/o.
    setting up the control registers to keep Busy from falling to 0

    The main problem here was that the I/O space cannot just be accessed from user space. A bit of naive thinking set me to think that open("/dev/lp0",O_RDWD|O_NONBLOCK) would just be sufficient. Instead a lot of bit fiddling though mmap() lead to the solution. Just another thing about linux that just might be a bit less universal ...

  6. More stuff to do:

    setting up ISDN
    setting up QT for front end programs
    fix mozilla
    fix the RPM ghost in my machine
    fix pppd's inconsequent behaviour
    fix http transfer speed
    fix vidcap textmode capture
    stop spending so much time on creating this page
    getting sleeeeep..
    and a life ??
    hope to get the rest of the windies here in time

    A lot to do and so little time ..

Most of all my problems originated from the incorrect setup of gcc and the libraries.
Hopefully the netwinder will become more stable and complete with version 2.0 of the disc image.

Jan Rinze.

A view of our small winder:
(b/w unfortunately, color soon available.)

And a view of here, out of our window at night :
I should really do something about this page..

1 nov. 1998 last updated.