Comments on: HUGE UPDATE – Fluxbox WM and full windowed multitasking working on the Zipit Z2

By: Hunter Davis

Hunter Davis — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:08:11 +0000

Hey JH,

That’s a pretty cool electronics site you posted. I had never thought of adding a trackball before… Doesn’t look too bad, could probably wire it up to the z2′s breakout pins…Interesting…

By: J H

J H — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:43:40 +0000

Don’t know if it’s been mentioned before, but maybe with some time you could get linux to recognize one of these
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9320
to work with the linux on the zipit.
That might take a while, but would be very cool.

By: hunter

hunter — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:48:09 +0000

Nice!, I think I”m going to compile this directly on the z2 and cut out the bitbake process entirely, very fun stuff!

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:31:30 +0000

Check out http://keymouse.berlios.de/ as a mouse emulator. Been meaning to port it, but haven’t had time.

By: Hunter Davis

Hunter Davis — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 22:22:42 +0000

Hi Todd,

Great news! Fantastic work with debian… If we could switch from ipkg I’d be all about that! Plus it’d make upstream patching a bit more formal. I actually do have the same issue with my left shift modifier not working in X apps. I haven’t looked into it any, just re-mapped all keys not to use the number buttons.

As for an ipkg repository, I think it’s a great idea. Wondering how the package-index would work with multiple contributors, but I’m sure we could work it out. I’ve got a ton of stuff bitbaked (perhaps incorrectly in the case of pangofonts….) Would it help to upload the .ipk files for fbdev and kdrive? I still have not had the time to pare down the size of my rootfs (about a gig)..

By: Todd

Todd — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:31:44 +0000

And I persist…figured out part of this. If you’re using Xfbdev, then X is getting keymappings directly from the kernel (according to: http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/kdrive.html), and thus the keyboard behaves nicely. I’ve been running xorg, which uses the Xfbdev driver, but isn’t Xfbdev itself, and it’s trying to use a standard keyboard map.

I’ll have to look at bitbaking Xfbdev myself. Hunter, would it be possible to include a base image (as before wireless+X), but with wireless+Xfbdev and kdrive? I’m starting to think about an ipkg repository. At the very least, we could upload stuff on sourceforge?

By: Todd

Todd — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:08:22 +0000

Hunter,

Sorry in advance for this long post. On madplay, my current kernel (2.6.29 which I grabbed from sweetlilmre on sourceforge) lacks sound support. Sweetlilmre reported that 2.6.29-rc3 has sound support, but I tried to grab it yet or get it from the SVN to recompile. He also writes battery support is in that kernel.

I spent some time last night grabbing precompiled binaries from the Debian repository for “armel”, which runs on our Z2. I had to mangle the dependencies myself (with no apt or dpkg), but got openbox, fbpanel, feh, gmrun, wmctrl, and xdotool to work splendidly. These essentially make up the standard desktop I use anyway, and with synergy, I had an even smaller “laptop” next to my EEEpc!

I’ve stopped with the HAL issue since adding the lines in my Xorg.conf fix the earlier no-keyboard problem. On font rendering, mine looked fine in pidgin (if a little big), but that was from the Angstrom ipkg, not anything I bitbaked myself.

I still a keyboard translation problem in X, though, where I can’t get to any of the Alt+ keys to print what they should. I’m sure it’s a keyboard mapping problem (but no amount of “xmodmap” will fix this problem). Do your keys work the same in and out of X/Xfbdev? If so, do you know what keyboard map your graphical system is using?

One last thing–I tried debootstrap-ing over the base image. That got me apt-get, dpkg, etc, and I was able to grab lots of fun stuff from the debian repos natively. But I must have broken something when busybox kicks in, as after reboot I get no login. Se la vie…

Well done on the NES. I see you just got full speed emulation up. The big issues I need to sort out are sound, battery, a small WM, and X mouse emulation…

By: r4v5

r4v5 — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 01:34:25 +0000

Well, I’ll be buying one of these next pay period. You should consider using a WM that’s set up for mouseless systems: ion3 or awesomewm both have the same kind of menu setup and different workspaces you can switch to with a keypress, which is probably for the best on a 320×240 display.
I’ll probably try playing with that when I get paid.

By: hunter davis

hunter davis — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 17:09:51 +0000

Hi Todd,

Nice on the links rendering, that is good to know . You will probably want to change your keyboard type so the alt key isn’t Lshift, this will prevent you from using number keys in X apps. Good luck getting HAL working!! I’m still stuck figuring out why pango doesn’t see my truetype fonts (keeps firefox and netsurf from running), hopefully will have some time this weekend to push things along. Do you have audio output working with madplay? I’m not that into audio apps myself so I haven’t even gone down that road yet… but that’s another checkbox on my todo list for the Z2 distro image. For a while now a few of us have really wanted to put together a full image for new users that has web browsing, mp3 playing, and scummvm (with a legal rom like AQ) fully working and ready to go from bootup. The setup seems to be one of our major hurdles into getting more people working on this. Good luck and Good work!!

By: Todd

Todd — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:16:06 +0000

Aha..simple fix, I should have noticed this in xorg. Adding “AllowEmptyInput” “false” to xorg.conf works like a charm. So my full X now reads:

Section “Device”
Identifier “Card0″
Driver “fbdev”
Option “fbdev” “/dev/fb0″
VendorName “Unknown”
BoardName “Unknown”
Option “Rotate” “CCW”
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Screen0″
Device “Card0″
SubSection “Display”
Modes “240×320″
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Generic Keyboard”
Driver “kbd”
Option “CoreKeyboard”
Option “Rules” “xorg”
Option “Model” “pc105″
Option “Layout” “us” # << these may be wrong, weird mappings for "ALT+" keys
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen "Screen0"
InputDevice "Generic Keyboard"
Option "AllowEmptyInput" "false"
EndSection

This is such a cool little machine…