A package for Linux on a Psion 5MX

Changes

7 May 2006 - General update; new HOWTO available.
5 February 2004 - Changed the link to get Debian ARM binaries; ARM binaries can be obtained directly from Debian's "Debian Packages" now.
28 May 2003 - Changed links of the large tarball distributions to aim at the "File Releases" page for Psilinux.

24 April 2003 - Deleted PicoGUI; it is not really effective, as far as I know

24 April 2003 - Moved most of the large tarballs and *.deb files to the Netherlands (wendy.djo.tudelft.nl);
the links for these will still work they just aim at the Netherlands now. [University policies regarding disk usage and so forth]

17 February 2003 - Added a set of Release Notes

10 February 2003 - Added a cleaned up version of the Debian Woody tarball (10 MB), a basic set of *.deb files for X windows (6-10 MB), AND a cleaned up version of Debian Woody with X windows installed tarball (17 MB). See link at the bottom.
Removed old distribution, "Distorted Woody", aka disk2.tar.gz. We salute "Distorted Woody"! :)

3 February 2003 - Made a set of notes on how to assemble the aforementioned base Debian Woody. See the link at the bottom of the page.

2 February 2003 - Made a new base Debian Woody distribution - primitive but a (mostly) clean, updated distribution. See the link at the bottom of the page.

25 January 2003 - Added a screenshot of X, Octave and Gnuplot!; fixed link to mail list archives.

27 December 2002 - Fixed a few broken links (??? gremlins.), added comments that X is easy to install, added a counter.

23 October 2002 - Made a few corrections and warnings about the initrd.gz (it might not work)

1 April 2002 - Gave a link to the origin (debian_woody.tar.gz) of the distribution - the dpkg system of my distribution is slightly, and annoyingly, broken; caveat emptor.

21 March 2002 - Merely news: X windows will now work on the Psion 5MX. See the HOWTO link below.

20 March 2002 - removed xinetd package and configured inetd (saving 1MB of disk and 500KB of RAM)

19 March 2002 - added a tarball for picoGUI.

18 March 2002 - updated the EPOC and linux tarballs to use the latest ARLO and kernel
Updated libc; configured rsh, rcp, xinetd; some clean up of the system and its
configuration.

This page has had       visits since December 27, 2002.

Introduction

These are a set of notes on installing my homegrown linux filesystem for a Psion 5MX handheld computer (16 MB of RAM, 64 MB compactflash disk). Most of the notes that were here have now been moved to the OpenPsion on the Psion 5MX HOWTO (revised Spring 2006).

N.B.: There is now a distribution for Sarge that can be used for the 5MX. Download "SargeBook_v5.tgz" or "SargeBook_v5-lite.tgz" from Sourceforge Files, and follow these instructions to modify that tarball to work on the 5MX. This installation requires a compactflash card size greater than 256 MB, but includes the apt-get package and many other useful things.

You may download the modified, Woody "distribution" from the links at the bottom of this page.

The Linux package is based on the ARM binaries of Debian Linux, and "Woody" was used for this purpose. I have taken the Woody package, which takes up about 70 MB of disk space, and hacked "unnecessary [?]" bits out of it, and added in a bunch of useful stuff, and reconfigured the basic system - in particular, the directory /etc is somewhat changed from Woody, and elements of /usr/share have been massacred.

One of the linux "distributions" below includes the X windows system. This "distribution" will fit onto a 64 MB compactflash card. If you want to install X yourself, it is fairly easy - you need merely install the dozen or so *.deb files listed on the X installation HOWTO page, set up a simple ~/.xinitrc file, and execute "xinit". You can get these selected *.deb files below. A 128 MB or greater-sized compactflash card works best.


X Screenshot: Octave and Gnuplot on the 5MX!


(To install Octave, just install the ARM version of the octave *.deb file
from the "Testing" versions of the Debian packages.)


I also revised the initial root disk (initrd.gz) from the Woody distribution to fix a number of annoyances - e.g. e2fsck didn't work and the root RAM disk was too small. When using this filesystem, the kernel loads it into memory on a ram disk /dev/ram0, and it does not require the compactflash disk (/dev/hda2). Thus, it is really intended to be used as a sort of rescue system - to run, e.g., e2fsck on the disk.

The main site for OpenPsion is http://www.openpsion.org, and the e-mail archives are at Linux-7110-psion Archives. The former link may have more recent kernel images, packages, etc.

It is amazing to see linux on the Psion 5MX!

Requirements

    These directions have been written for a psion 5MX computer with 16 MB of RAM and a 64 MB compactflash disk on a US version of the psion. The system has 11 MB of free space. It may be that the distribution will work for other psions -there are no guarantees in life.

    The directions assume that you have a means of accessing the compactflash card either via a notebook computer or a compactflash reader.  If you don't have a compactflash reader and want to try this out, then invest in a USB compactflash reader (they are O(US$20) and supported by linux as scsi devices).   (Technically, one might be able to do the installation by booting the system to memory using initrd/ram disks, and formatting the disk from there - this would mean, however, downloading the 41 MB filesystem over the serial port...)

Installation and bootup

    The basic installation is in two steps 1) format the compact flash disk to have a 4.0 MB dos filesystem and an ext2 filesystem of the remainder of the disk - to have at least 42 MB and 2) to unpack the tarballs into those respective filesystems. With a bit of work, and deleting a few non-essentials from the tarballs, you might get these to fit on a 45MB compactflash card (with very little free space leftover).

    STEP 0:  If you have anything on the compact flash that you want to save, back it up.  The procedure below will delete everything from it.

    STEP 1.  With the compact flash inserted in your desktop or notebook computer, access it with fdisk; BE VERY SURE YOU ARE USING THE RIGHT DEVICE - YOU CAN TAKE OUT YOUR DESKTOP LINUX SYSTEM!.  I used "fdisk /dev/hde", but you may need to use "/dev/sda" etc. - whatever device your system recognizes as your compactflash.  Delete the dos partition on the compact flash.   Make the first primary partition to be 4.0 MB in size (cylinder 1 to +4000K), and set its type to dos fat16 (I used type 4).  Make the second partition to be the remainder of the compact flash and leave it as an ext2/linux partition (unless you have a large disk and want swap space or a second partition for some reason).  Make the dos filesystem on /dev/hde1 ("mkdosfs /dev/hde1" ***see large capitalized letters above***) and the ext2 filesystem on /dev/hde2 ("mke2fs /dev/hde2" ***ditto***).  Done with step 1!

    STEP 2.  Mount the dos filesystem - "mount -t vfat /dev/hde1 /flash"  (I used /flash but you can use any convenient mount point).  Unpack the first disk tar package into /flash:  "tar xfz disk1.tar.gz -C /flash".  Unmount the dos filesystem "umount /flash".
        Mount the ext2 filesystem - "mount -t ext2 /dev/hde2 /flash".  Unpack the second disk tar package into /flash - "tar xfz disk2.tgz -C /flash".  Note you are better off using tar this way, rather than untarring the package to a filesystem and copying the filesystem over, because tar preserves the links, while "cp" will make duplicate files of the links and so use up much more space (but perhaps there is a smarter way of using "cp").  [You can also untar this filesystem in a convenient isolated directory, and browse through it and/or modify it to your own purposes before putting it on the compact flash disk].  Unmount the ext2 filesystem "umount /flash". Done with step 2!

    After waiting for the compact flash disk to properly unmount from the desktop, take the disk out of the computer and put it in the psion. To boot up linux, startup ARLO from the Extras bar. You will get a menu of flavors of systems to boot up - linux and linux.initrd are already set up. The former boots using /dev/hda2 as the root filesystem, while the latter uses an initrd (e.g., for fixing something with the /dev/hda2 filesystem). Hit return the normal multiuser system. Pan down for the linux.initrd system. With the /dev/hda2 filesystem, you should get a login prompt - enter "root", no passwords required. The /root/.profile file may be configured to your preferences, e.g., font size.
    On occasion at boot up the system goes wacko - so far a simple reset/reboot has been effective, i.e., try it again.  This may have to do with the psion system having not quite booted up entirely from the previous reset.

    All done! Happy to take corrections or suggestions for a better system. This system is hacked, to be sure.

I've written some notes on the timekeeping problem that may be found HERE. These notes have largely been outdated by kernel advances - the RTC of the latest psion kernel goes a long ways towards solving the timekeeping problem. Linux now has access to the hardware clock.

Some Tarballs

You will need to get the tarball "disk1.tar.gz" for ArLo and a linux kernel on the EPOC partition, and one of "newwoody.tgz" (an original, uncleaned up version of Woody), "alt_woody.tgz" (a cleaned up version of Woody), or "Xwoody.tgz" (a cleaned up version of Woody with a cleaned up X windows). "Cleaned up" means that a large number of fonts, "foreign" language files, and metadata have been removed - saving 10's of MB in disk space. The second tarball is a linux filesystem to be unpacked on the 2nd ext2 filesystem of the compactflash.

The dos file system (kernel, ARLO, initrd.gz) can be obtained from Sourceforge Files Get the disk1_May2006.tgz tarball under Arlo. (2.5 MB to download, 3.6 MB unpacked).
    The kernel that included in this tarball is Tony's 2.4.19 kernel; you may want to upgrade it if it is old. ARLO is version 2.0.1; a GUI version that is started as an EPOC application. It also includes the various timekeeping OPL programs I've put together. The tarball also includes an initrd.gz.

N.B.: I've learned that the kernel included in this tarball will not work for a 5MX PRO. If you have a 5MX PRO, please obtain the correct kernel from openpsion.org, at this link. The kernel included in this tarball will not recognize the compactflash card if you have a 5MX PRO (but it will work fine for a 5MX). You may also want to change the kernel for the uk or de version, if you have a uk or de keyboard.

You can try out picoGUI if you like, although picogui doesn't seem like it is going anywhere. You can find the bits you need from Tader's Psion 5MX Linux Pages To start it up, first make sure you set the framebuffer depth to 4bpp:"fbset -a 4bpp" [you can then darken the text to see something by "Fnc ."], then execute /usr/local/bin/pgserver. Alas, it works marginally, and there are few applications. PicoGUI is discouraged at this point.

Base Woody Distribution (February 10, 2003)

Woody has been formally updated to a stable state - Debian 3.0. It seemed time to update the basic Woody distribution from the kludged version I started with. This successful update is something of a breakthrough, since the original author of the first woody.tar.gz tarball could not remember how to remake it, and until now I have not been able to make it from scratch. I have written a set notes on how to assemble this installation for the 5MX. The file tarball can be downloaded from Distributions (get newwoody.tgz) (42 MB; 72 MB unpacked). Unpack the tarball into /dev/hda2 of the compactflash disk (or to a local directory on your PC). It is a primitive start of a linux distribution, based only on the "basedebs.tar" initial installation file. The procedure is sort of outlined in the Debian ARM Installation Manual. The original *.deb files can be found in the tar ball in the /var/cache/apt/archive/ directory, and deleting them will clear up about 21 MB of space. The distribution is mostly pristine - the only configurations I made were to the /etc/fstab, /etc/inittab, /etc/rc, /etc/rc.inet files (and other minor additions, e.g. a /root/.bashrc file , an /msdos directory, /etc/inetd.conf file). /etc/fstab is set up for /dev/hda1 (msdos) and /dev/hda2 (ext2). This distribution has internet and ppp installed. You can view the list of packages that have been formally installed in this tarball by clicking on this list.

Cleaned-up Version  I've cleaned up the above Woody package, and you can get it from Distributions (get alt_woody.tgz) (10.7 MB download, 26 MB unpacked). This package is almost identical to the above, but "non-essential" (?) data and packages have been removed, together with the base *.deb files. You can see a script that I used HERE: psilinux.cleanup. The intention is to manage the packages via a low-level dpkg install, so the apt package has been removed.

X WINDOWS:  I've collected the essential *.deb (and other) files for X windows HERE, if you want to install X. Download these files and see the README there for how to proceed. It will install on the cleaned up Woody package above. From 6-10 MB of files to download, depending on if you get the fonts or not. Installation of X will bump your filesystem size from 26 MB up to about 40 MB, several MB larger if you install the fonts. Alternatively, I make available the package from Distributions (get Xwoody.tgz) (17 MB download, 40 MB unpacked) which contains these X windows *.deb files already installed and cleaned up. Many of the "foreign" language files and fonts have been deleted from this filesystem. With this tarball, merely boot up and type xinit to get X windows.

Release Notes  I've now started a set of Release Notes to describe problems/omissions/errata etc. with these tarballs.

Wondering where to get ARM binaries?  You can now browse the Debian packages, and conveniently download arm binaries, at Debian Packages. These *.deb packages should install without trouble on the filesystems above.