[jornada] OpenPsion's SargeBook on the Jornada 720

Having had some problems with Debian images from Matthis I decided it
might be worth trying the SargeBook images from the openpsion project
(http://openpsion.org). For those that don't know they are trying to get
Debian Sarge working on a the Psion netbook/Series 7 which are both
based on the same Strong ARM 1100 processor the Jornada 720 uses,
feature 16 or 32 meg of RAM, Compact Flash/PCMCIA and a touch screen.
The main difference between them and the jornada is that they are
physically bigger and the screen does VGA resolutions (640x480, not sure
if it can do 800x600).

I first tried their SargeBook v4 image
(http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/linux-7110/SargeBook_v4.tgz?download)
but for some reason cardmgr didn't start, although it ran when I
manually started it (but running /etc/init.d/pcmcia just gave me a login
prompt for some reason). This also failed to work with my wireless card,
but was fine with a regular ethernet card. apt-get worked ok on this
distro, but as it was an old pre-release version of sarge it wanted to
update everything.

I then tried the latest SargeBook v5
(http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/linux-7110/SargeBook_v5.tgz?download),
this recognised my wireless card flawlessley although the default
scripts didn't run dhcp but thats only a minor change. This distro seems
to have an up to date version of Sarge including libc6 which is what
caused me problems with the Jornada images, it also includes apt-get,
ssh, XIpaq and a few other useful utils. When XIpaq started displays a
mouse pointer and the alternating blank and white background that X
gives by default. However the touch screen doesn't seem to respond
(guess I need to change some settings somewhere as the Psion probably
uses a different touchscreen driver). If I login to the Jornada via ssh
and export the display to :0 I can get things to appear on the screen.

 Apart from getting X working I have one other problem, dpkg doesn't
seem to work. Whether its called directly or as part of apt-get it just
says:

__alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x1d2/0)
VM: killing process dpkg-query

At first I thought this might be due to a lack of memory, but I tried
killing off every process giving me about 29mb free and I still got the
error. Has anyone seen this error before with dpkg? Any idea what it means?

 The version of dpkg included in this distro seems to be different to
the jornada one and i'm considering "cross breeding" this distro with
the Jornada debian images or with sargebook v4 and copying dkpg from
there to see if that works.

I feel that i'm nearly there with getting a fully working Debian system
that will happily install any package via apt-get without prompting me
to upgrade half of the system.
Received on Tue Oct 11 2005 - 18:10:25 EDT