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I started reading through Alex Osbourne’s patches for his port of Linux to the Palm LifeDrive and it turns out that a lot of the work for supporting the Palm Hardware has already been done!

This an example of where Open Source shines – each new platform developer writes a couple of new drivers, making it even easier for the next port that comes along!

I just wanted to thank Alex for blazing the path that I’m going to be following here. There’s a lot of work in decoding GPIOs and handling the minor platform differences, but we can certainly share a lot of code.

Last night’s hacking progress was targeted at getting the SD/MMC driver up and running. Since the PXA27x platform has built-in SD/MMC support, it’s just a matter of setting up the SD/MMC communication GPIOs (clock, data, command channel) and locating the GPIOs for detecting SD card insertion events and read-only status.

I haven’t managed to get the SD card driver working on my phone, but I think it has something to do with my SD card. One of the testers on the IRC channel got it to mount his 512MB high-speed SD card correctly.

Using the PXA matrix keypad driver from the LifeDrive Linux port, I managed to get full keyboard support for the Treo 650. It took a lot of manual keyboard matrix decoding, but you can now type into the Busybox shell!

I need to figure out why Busybux isn’t accepting the KP_ENTER key as a proper return. I’ll bet it’s some sort of userspace keyboard mapping, but I’ve never played with that sort of thing.

Get it while it’s hot! I’ve started dumping information to the handhelds.org wiki:

Palm Treo 650 Wiki Page

I also managed to get the LCD properly initialized last night. It turns out that the L_BIAS pin set in pxafb.c is being set, even if the attached display doesn’t require it. This causes the Sony LCD that the Treo uses to go entirely white (as if it were disabled). Commenting this line out fixes it, but I’ll need to add a proper check for display type before submitting a patch to handhelds.org.

Once I have a keyboard driver and some way of communicating with the device (it’ll be either Bluetooth or USB Ethernet) I’ll probably push out a release for early adopters to play with.

After a week of hacking, I finally convinced my Treo 650 to boot linux.

I have a page registered on handhelds.org where I’ll be collecting information once I get a bit further. I’ll try to have something available so more people can have a go at it.

To answer some of the questions people have had: