eQip FAQ.
Version 0.3 (10/05/02)
| Maintainer :Jean-Louis Villecroze | eQip Development Team |
This document offer answers to may questions one can asks about the eQip project and the
QNX experience on a PDA.
- What is eQip ?
- What does eQip stand for ?
- I need help, who can I contact ?
- Is 38XX,39XX,Zaurus supported?
- Im a WinCE user, is eQip for me ?
- Is the application XYZ available for eQip ?
- Is this project open-source ? Can I contribute ?
- I want to install it on my PDA, how do I start ?
- How do I upload a file to my PDA ?
- Can I use my USB cradle ?
- Can I use my sleeve and my CF card ? What about my old PCMCIA flash card ?
- I reboot and the bootloader do/show nothing ! What the ... ???
- How to enable my extra 16mb flash ?
- How to set-up the PPP link with my desktop/laptop ?
- I have a spare network card, how do I configure it ?
- How do I share my internet connection with my PDA ?
- No suspend/resume mode ?
- I pressed the Power Button and the PDA went into sleep state, but it wont wakeup!
- Now I want to try Linux on my PDA ...
- Slow/boggus transfert rate when using the PPP connection
- I installed eQip, but its blocked in the screen calibration !
- df claims that I have available FS space but I cannot copy anything to the PDA !
- Can eQip be run from a Compact Flash Storage Card ?
- Failing to restore WinCE
- How do I turn off the backlight ?
- How do I beam data ?
- I would like to make a screenshot, but how ?
- Version History
eQip is a project of the QNX community. From the project specification:
The system will be used mainly in a device carried by an individual in their pocket or
bag. The device will be a mobile computer with limited resources (storage,RAM,battery).
It will support pen inputs and voice commands from the user. The system will also be used
embedded in an appliance or in a vehicle.
You can found the specifications document here
As for time of the FAQ, the only PDA supported by eQip are the HP iPAQ 36XX and 37XX.
It stand for "embedded QNX for information appliance", and no we dont have
a logo yet (maybe you have suggestion ?)
For a quick answer try the IRC irc.qnxzone.com, channel #eqip, or
email the following persons:
- Chris
- Gregor (for questions regarding bootldr and bootblaster)
- Johan
- Jean-Louis
Else, the help you need is in the FAQ or in the documents ? :)
Its in the works, stay tuned on IRC and the webpage for more
information.
It is very depend on what you doing with your PDA ... but as the project
is still in a very early stage, the answer is probably NO. But
keep an eye on the project, you may be surprise .. :)
Aside from the applications that come in the eQip image flashed on your PDA and a few third-party
applications, there nothing much available yet.
Stay tuned on the web site to see when a new application is available. You may also want to
contact us or a third-party developer to request an application.
You are free to develop for it in a non-commercial manner (ie: as long as it is
open-source or you dont charge for the closed source stuff). 99% of the code
(outside of the kernel, by line count) is open-sourced and available on the CVS server,
you are more than welcome to join to gang :)
If you want to make commercial softwares, no problem with us, but you need to contact
QSS to get your hand on a commercial licence of QNX (unless you already have it).
Congrats and welcome! :) Follow step-by-step this
document. You do not need to have QNX
running on a PC in order to install eQip, but it is better if you do.
There is several ways :
- Using a network card
This is the best and fastest way. Check the question "I have a spare network card, how do I configure it ?".
- Using pdebug and the serial cable
Hum .. unless you need to debug remotly an application, this way is not very handy. but if you really want to go the hard way, follow this link for the details.
- Using rz and lz and the serial cable
This work ok, but it is not so handy, altought its "simple" to do:
- Connect your PDA to a PC running a serial console app capable of sending/receiving file with the ZModem protocol (qtalkz under QNX)
- log as root on your PDA
- go to the directory where you want to upload the file
- type :
rz < /dev/ser3 > /dev/ser3
- in the serial console app, select the file to send and send it
- Once the file as been uploaded, rz will terminate.
- Setting-up PPP over the serial cable on using ftp
This is the way to go if you only have a serial connection. You will also be able to telnet to/from
your PDA. Check the question "How to set-up the PPP link with my desktop/laptop ?".
Not yet, but stay tuned.
Yes you can, no problem. Just pop the CF card into the sleeve and eQip
will see it and mount as a sub-directory of /fs (/fs/flash0-qnx4 or
/fs/flash0-dos) according to the way your card is formatted).
Beware that some brand of CF card do not work (yet) with eQip :
- Megadata, Ritek Corp. (32Mb CF card)
Note that eQip support the qnx4 and dos filesystems.
As for the old-style flash PCCard, we do not support them right now.
Messing with the bootldr you have, young paddawan ...
First, dont panic, take big breath ... relax ... you may not have bricked your PDA ....
While your PDA is connected to a PC with the serial cable, press the joypad (in its center)
and hold it while your use the pen to reset the PDA. This reboot the device and put the bootloader
into a debug mode, from which you may be able to see whats wrong or reflash a working version of
the bootloader.
If nothing works ... well, sorry .. :( It seems that you have bricked your PDA ... contact
the maker of your PDA to see how you can send it to them to be reflashed ... :<
If you are the lucky owner of a device with 32mb of internal flash, you may have noticed that the
eQip install see only 16mb (and use about 8). To enable the left over 16mb and use them, you need
to do :
iPaq> flashctl -v -p /dev/fs0p2 -e -f -n /flash -m
It should take sometime to prepare the flash and create the FS on it. Hopefully, when its
done, you should have a new /flash directory in the root with 16mb to use :).
If you cant found this directory, something may have went wrong in the mounting. Do this:
iPaq> flashctl -p /dev/fs0p2 -m
This should take care of your problem.
Note that this 16mb wont be erased when you will be reflashing a newer version of eQip, and that
you do not need to execute flashtcl when the system boot.
There is a pretty good PDF document here, that show you how to do that :) Be sure
to read also "Slow/boggus transfert rate when using the PPP connection".
First, the card (if not wireless) needs to be an ne2000 pcmcia card. eQip
does not support cardbus or 32bit pcmcia so it is important to make
sure it is a true 16bit pcmcia card. By default the system will configure
you card (drivers and such) automatically and will start dhcp.client to
obtain an IP address.
On your desktop computer, if you are using QNX, modify the file /etc/dhcpd.conf
like this:
# dhcpd.conf
#
default-lease-time 600;
max-lease-time 7200;
#ddns-update-style ad-hoc;
# This is a very basic subnet declaration.
subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.0.50 192.168.0.200;
# Set of parameters common to all clients
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option routers 192.168.0.1;
option broadcast-address 192.168.0.255;
option domain-name "nl.qnx.com";
option domain-name-servers 192.168.0.1;
option netbios-name-servers 192.168.0.1;
option ip-forwarding on;
option netbios-node-type 8;
}
host qpaq {
hardware ethernet 00:05:8a:00:02:c4;
fixed-address qpaq;
}
and then start (as root) dhcpd. Make sure that qpaq is definied in
your /etc/hosts.
dhcpd is not included in the Non-Commercial release of QNX, you need to download it
and compile it for QNX.
Can we get back to you on that ? Thanks!
Support for the suspend/resume mode of the PDA (using the power button) is not yet implemented
(but soon it will). In the maintime, the Power Button put the device in some kind of sleep
(be careful at the battery level, as the "sleep" mode still use the battery more than the normal
WinCE suspend) and it can be awaken (kinda) later (QNX will reboot when awaken).
Sometimes your PDA may not awake at all, either you have run out of battery, or
something odd happend, just restart the PDA using the battery switch.
The bootloader you have flashed when installing QNX on your PDA is not really compatible with
Linux, so the best is to use it to flash the bootloader that come with the Linux distro
for PDA:
boot> load bootldr
Then upload (xmodem) the replacement bootloader and reboot your iPAQ once it is done. You
then just have to follow the installation steps found on this web site.
Once you have played with Linux and wants to come back to a real OS ;-), you just do the reverse
steps, reflash the QNX bootloader, and reflash the ifs and efs.
Edit the file /etc/init and comment the line :
TERM=qansi on -t /dev/ser3 login
You wont have the serial console anymore but the serial
connection will reach 10kb/s without issue ...
Keep the stylus pressed on the rotating circle till it moves to another position, continue this operation
till you see a button which tells you that the calibration was performed succesfully.
This is an infamous bug in the flash FS that we havent yet corrected. There is no real pattern
in how it occurs ... but it seems to happend when copying large files (+/- 1Mb) to flash and removing them.
The only things you can its to backup the files you need, and reflash the eQip image on your
PDA. Sorry :(
Not yet. When we locked down everything for the 6.2 release the HP bootloader did not
support CF booting. However, it does now and We will soon have a new bootloader ready.
The reason is simple, your PDA like too much eQip to let it go ;-)
More seriously, we found that flashing the whole image as a single unit would always fail.
The image was always corrupted. What may work is to break it down into a bunch of parts and
flash each part individually (
More infos here)
The round-about way to this link is to go to http://www.handhelds.org,
go to the FAQ,
go to "WinCE (PocketPC) Restoration",
and go to the Wiki link (it is near the top)
On QNX (or any other UNIX-like), you can use the dd program to split it (ce.img is the image file):
# dd bs=1024 count=256 if=ce.img of=parrot.bin # dd bs=1024 skip=256 count=3840 if=ce.img of=flash_00040000.bin # dd bs=1024 skip=4096 count=4096 if=ce.img of=flash_00400000.bin # dd bs=1024 skip=8192 count=4096 if=ce.img of=flash_00800000.bin # dd bs=1024 skip=12288 count=4096 if=ce.img of=flash_00c00000.bin
These commands break it down into four 8Mb chunks (minus the boot loader
which is in parrot.bin).
The name of each output file tells you the location to load it into the
flash (ex 0x40000).
If your PDA has more than 16mb of flash and that you havent used the extra flash with eQip, you only need to
flash the first 16mb.
This is not yet fully implemeted, sorry. But in the maintime, you may want to use the
little application called ipaq_blanker that turn off the backlight when you havent
taped on the screen for sometimes, and turn it back on when you finaly tap on it.
The best way to run it, its to add it to the bottom of the /etc/init file :
/path/to/it/ipaq_blanker &
This is a pretty handy app that can help save battery time :)
This is not currently implemented in eQip. Stay tuned.
You first need to upload on your PDA the QNX application snapshot for (you will find it in /armle/usr/photon/bin)
then run it (from the serial console or trought a telnet). This is a very crude port of
the desktop version, but it works. Select the output as JPG (or else) file, and select
the full screen mode (if you like). When the screenshot is taken, the file will appears
in the / directory. You can then download it from your desktop computer.
| Release date | Version | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| 10/05/02 | 0.3 |
|
| 10/03/02 | 0.2 | Severals questions and answers added. |
| 10/02/02 | 0.1 | Initial release |
| (C) eQip Project Team 2002 |
/DOCS/FAQ |