here is a short step-by-step story (so step-by-step to be boring, if not
offensive, to most of you) of my experience. Mind you tought that linux is
still not really usable on a716, at the moment. 

WARNING!!! 
All kind of bad things could happen to your pda if you tinker with it.
This ranges from losing all your data (very likely, so, please, backup
them) to turning it into a very expensive brick. You are the only one
responsible for it (I am not even sure how my a716 is still working!),
after all you had been warned!


(lines starting with $ are examples of commands, usually executed as root, do
_not_ just copy and paste them, they are _examples_)

-I downloaded the kernel, the rootfs image, the intrd and the loader
from the links in http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/MyPal716
$mkdir ~/a716
$cd ~/a716/
$wget http://www.handhelds.org/~aquadran/MyPal716/kernel/2005aug11/zImage http://www.handhelds.org/~aquadran/MyPal716/distro/2005aug11/opie-image-h3900-20050811174654.rootfs.tar.bz2 http://handhelds.org/~aquadran/MyPal716/winceloader/MyPal716_Linux.exe http://handhelds.org/~aquadran/MyPal716/winceloader/params http://www.lo5.ids.bielsko.pl/~migdalj/download/a716/initrd/initrd_cf.gz

-copied the relevant files (zImage, MyPal716_Linux.exe, initrd_cf.gz) to
the /Flash Disk/ dir in my pda. Leaving them on the flash disk means
they will stay there even if I hard reset the device.

-edited the "params" file to read (you can use your favourite text editor):

\Flash Disk\zImage
\Flash Disk\initrd_cf.gz
console=tty0 root=/dev/hda1

-copied "params" in /Flash Disk/ on the pda

-created an ext2 filesystem on the compact flash (I have a usb card
reader, so the relevant device is /dev/sda1) with mkfs.ext2 (you will
lose everything that was stored on it)
$mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda1

-mounted the new filesystem on /mnt/ with the "dev" option (look at the
mount man page, I spent a week trying to have linux working this summer
without realizing why init could not find /dev/hda1)
$mount -odev -text2 /dev/sda1 /mnt/

-untarred the rootfs images in the cf 
$cd /mnt/
$tar xjvf ~/a716/opie-image-h3900-20050811174654.rootfs.tar.bz2

-Finally I umounted the cf
$cd ..
$umount /mnt/

-inserted it into the a716 and clicked on MyPal716_Linux.exe

A few moments later the opie splashscreen appeared.


Some tricks

If you hard-reset with the cf in it, your /dev/hda1 partition will be
formatted to a fat32 partition, to avoid losing linux I made 3 partition:
 - an empty /dev/hda1 formatted as fat32 
 - /dev/hda2 with opie on it
 - /dev/hda3 with gpe on it
wince will not touch hda2 and hda3 plus I can now test both opie and gpe
and swithch between them just by editing "params".
(you cf needs to be large enough)

The touchscreen does not work very well (why?) and typing with it is a
pain. But you can try and save yourself from madness by cheating while
calibrating the thing: do not tap on the cross on the screen but a
little at their left, play around "miscalibrating" it untill you get a
usable configuration.

Also the system feels slow (slower than PocketPC at least), but meybe
its because my CF is slow?