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Finally the ASUS a620 has Linux!!!!


Finally the ASUS a620 has Linux!!!!

Postby deciever » Oct 11, 2006 @ 3:36am

But is it too little too late? No one is talking about!

http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/MyPal620

You can download the new bootloader or whatever you want to call it(the firmware), but just make sure you can obtain the official ASUS firmware incase you need to flash it back. Thankfully I was in the scene long enough to obtain it while Asus offered it!

I haven't checked on this project for over a year but it is funny that today I decide to look into it again and there it is, only 6 days ago they made this happen!

I supose my Asus a620 no longer holds its own but I was pleased with how well it performed 2 years later when one of my friends got a PDA, he spent $100 more than me for an axim and only benched a few single digits higher than me lol. Talking about lasting for the ages! My dads casio PDA got smoked by the new ones almost the same day he brough it home.
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Postby deciever » Oct 11, 2006 @ 3:43am

the only thing that sucks though is that I am letting my sister who lives somewhere else borrow my compact flash card..... so either I need to get it back or order a new one...

I need a bigger when anyways... Can anyone tell me what all apps exist for this Opie Linux thing? Any good emulation apps for games maybe? lol probably not...
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Postby sponge » Oct 12, 2006 @ 7:22am

If you go with Opie, you can probably run most Zaurus apps.

I'll have to check this out; I actually checked the status of this a few weeks ago and it seemed like it was missing a few critical things.
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Postby deciever » Oct 14, 2006 @ 3:54am

well I just got my compact flash card back from my sis and I updated to Linux! Then my LCD went all wacky on me and I heard what I thought was a fizzle sound and started smelling something strange.....

So yea I just about crapped my pants and so I reset it and the LCD has no backlight on but I see the text flying across the screen. Then finally a penguin but no backlight still oo.

Thinking I just royally screwed my pda I thought well there goes my backlight... astounded still that out of anything to go out why would it be my backlight? So I grabbed my CF card again and loaded it up with the Windows Mobile 2003 rom for the a620. And sure enough as soon as I went into the bootloader to load the rom my backlight returns o0.

I dunno where that smell came from... maybe my imagination... anyways I will be reloading linux again now since I know it was ok after all lol.

But it does seem like I will have to go through part of it with no backlight to set it up ><
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Postby deciever » Oct 14, 2006 @ 4:05am

oddly a few weeks ago I had a flash drive fizzle and smoke, but it kept on running just fine.... after I scrapped off the burnt capacitor =)...

Ok I know just reloaded the rom image again but this time I much more quickly pressed the power button which makes it continue. Apparently right after the bootloader program loads this linux rom image if you do not press your power button quickly the LCD screen can overload and potentail damage or kill your backlight I suspect.

How or why my backlight resurrected itself I do not know! But I did reload the Windows mobile 2003 image which somehow I guess corrected my backlight issue and allowed me to reload this linux rom with the backlight on threw the entire setup process but it still smells o0..... but the smell is not worsening.

Guess yall have been warned, I will try and notify the guy that made this release so that he can warn others to quickly press the power button or suffer voltage overload or whatever it was... I supose it could have been coincidence though, still I wouldn't take any chances of not pressing the power button quickly after the rom finishes loading.
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Postby deciever » Oct 14, 2006 @ 6:09am

wow!!! all I got to say is this gets 5 stars all the way!!!

It feels and looks a thousand times more useable! And very quick in responding! It makes you wonder how microsoft could have created such a buggy and slow Windows Mobile that doesn't hardly come with any stock apps worth anything and how they couldn't have made their horrible GUI run any more responsive.

I will say it would run ok most of the time but every now and then for no reason it seemed like I'd be forced to do a soft reset. Granted third party programs such as wisbar and snoopdashboard helped a lot in the useability department for wm2003 and the GUI, and even some other program that let me rotate it 90 degrees but this linux feels, looks and runs a lot better imo from the get go!

Also I have reloaded Opie Linux on my a620 several times now, making sure my wm2003 works ok mainly because I was worried that my backlight could no longer be throttled to different brightness settings. I can confirm that at the moment this Opie can not control the Epson TCON controller I guess it is, well enough to throttle the backlight or for it to always activate the backlight 100% of the time.

But this is to be expected with the first release and with all things considered it is a very useable first release as far as hack jobs go!

I should also mention when updating your ROM always make sure your power is plugged into the AC. However it will let you do this running on battery but that is risky in itself.
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Postby sponge » Oct 14, 2006 @ 7:08pm

Opie is best experienced with WiFi, as the package manager is what makes it really shine over PPC. Download/compile apps all over the air.

http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/

I believe you can add it as a repository, but I do not remember how. I used Linux on my 3955 (god how I miss the screen on that sucker) quite extensively in the day, so can probably answer any questions.
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Postby deciever » Oct 16, 2006 @ 12:11am

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Postby sponge » Oct 16, 2006 @ 6:14am

Can't be done due to the way Linux treats RAM. WM uses it as storage, Linux uses it as actual RAM. The filesystem is stored in the Flash ROM, whereas on WM it's stored on RAM.

Despite this, you used to be able to dual boot Linux off the CF card but your data would get wiped everytime you did.

There are Windows programs to read ext/reiser/etc FSes. You might want to make sure that the CF card is formatted as FAT or FAT16, it may have trouble reading a FAT32 CF (although realistically, there's no reason it should)

Try mounting it from the command line and see if you get any errors.
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