2008 ends in several hours (may vary depending on your timezone), and I want to say some words about H&D in upcoming '09.

H&D as it is known now, appeared four years ego, evolving from my hobby project "Handheld Hacking". It started as a playground for linux port to Palm Tungsten T3. I want to thank all of the developers for keeping this most impressive H&D project up and running after I stopped working on it. Site popularity is constantly increasing, so you guys do right thing :)

It's nice to watch how H&D as global idea moves towards other hobby projects helping and supporting them. I'm talking mostly about Ukrainian Distributed Computing Team and StreamOS environment.

I hope we'll see more interesting challenges in the upcoming year. Our servers' uptime is 322 and 174 days, so we might see more stable and smooth operation (now when everything seem to settle down).

Have a happy 2009! And if you encounter some trouble - fix it and send a patch © :)

Does anyone happen to know the pinout for this 16-pin unsoldered connector on the LifeDrive? It also seems to be present in the Treos. See for example the Treo 680, top center of the picture there's a row of 8 unsoldered pads, there's another matching 8 above them covered by metal tab on the RF shield. The 680 one has the same GND, NC and VCC arrangement as the LifeDrive.

Update:

According to Chris in the comments below, it is indeed the JTAG port and the pinout is:

I've tweaked our rather neglected site slightly, please note the new Downloads, Sources and Wiki links in the top right, and the "Developer logs" items under the forum posts in the right siebar. The developer logs is just aggregating the Ohloh journal stuff, Miska's blog and my blog. Keep an eye on them for more detailed news (but more technical mumbo-jumbo too) and let me know if you want another feed added to it.

If you haven't been following the forums:

• the 680 kernel sort of works on the Centro and 700p.
• grindars had some sucess in making use of the NAND flash in the TX.
• I've made a (sort of working) wifi dongle for the PXA270 palms.
• Lo Yuk Fai and some others have been trying to get Android running. Last I heard they get the Android-logo splash screen on boot, but no further.

It turns out you can run the USB port on the multiconnector in host mode and connect whatever random USB devices you like. Wi-fi, keyboards, mice, hard drives, webcams and anything else that'll work with USB 1.1 speeds (the PXA27x's host controller is USB 1.1). I've made a video showing a standard USB keyboard and mouse hooked up to the Treo 650. In theory this should work on all the PXA27x based devices that use the CPU's USB port (so not the Lifedrive).

Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) has been playing with Linux on the Treo 650 as well. See his blog for a video and (expert level) instructions on running Illume (an Enlightenment module for mobile devices) on the Treo 650 and Neo Freerunner. Illume seems to run incredibly well given the Treo's meager specs.

I finally got around to figuring out ALSA settings for properly working phonecalls. See my blog for the ALSA details. Rod Whitby and I are going to have a look at adding support for the Treo 650 to FreeSmartPhone.org's frameworkd which is currently used for the Openmoko Linux phones.

During last months Marek and Sergey have made big efforts in pushing the results of almost 3 years' work upstream through ARM Linux tree. It seems that very soon we will see several more devices in vanilla.

However, there is small moment that I'd like to clarify now, when things are not yet fixed finally - mach-types for Palms. I did a small analysis of current mach-types file in ARM Linux tree and have found something that looks like deficiency to me. Here is what I see and what I'd like to see (sorry for poor formatting but I was not able to found how to make tables here):

I just recently added firmware extraction to cocoboot (to get palmtx wifi FW, just tap on the Dump Marvell WiFi Firmware in the pulldown menu). For now it works probably only on palmtx. Thanks to kEdAR, you can download the new version here http://kedar.palmlinux.cz/test/cocoboot-git20080702.prc

(btw. someone feels like fixing prc-tools for amd64, newer gcc etc. ? maybe you can reuse your wifi bounty for that ;-) )

With palmtx being slowly moved towards mainline, I gave a try to libertas driver. With little tweak, I was able to create ad-hoc network between palmld (with palmos) and palmtx (with linux).

What now? firmware loader from if_cs.c doesnt work so you have to enable wifi in palmos and then boot, anyone feels like fixing it?

Photos follow:

Just found out something interesting - I backported the libertas driver in mainline to -hh20, made some tweaks etc. . Well ... with wifi enabled in palmos, it is possible to set the card to ad-hoc networking in linux, assign essid and the device can be then seen by others ... but it crashes kernel when you connect to it, which might also be a result of my fast backporting of lbs driver .... well if anyone feels like hacking on it, I will put the patch and some photos here later.