Psion Netbook support?

On Thu, Dec 07, 2006 at 10:59:17 +0000, David Given wrote:

> I have a Psion Netbook. It's a rather nice machine,
apart from running Epoc,
> and I'd like a better operating system on it. The Linux
port works, mostly,
> but hardware support isn't great, and I'd rather run a
BSD.
> 
> According to the various mailing list archives, about
every nine months or so
> since the thing came out, there's been an announcement
that someone's been
> starting work on doing a NetBSD port --- one guy even
said that he'd had the
> kernel up and running. But then they seem to drop off
the face of the planet.
> 
> I don't suppose anyone happens to have a
hitherto-forgotten Netbook
> port lying around, do they?

The problem is that the docs for the proprietary system ASIC
used in
the Series 7/Netbook are not publicly avialble.  I think
Linux folks
had a special deal with Psion PLC to get access to the docs.

Ask Wookey <http://www.chaos
.org.uk/~wookey/> from PsiLinux project
for details.  Last time I talked to him about it was 4+
years ago, so
my memory is hazy.

I gave my Series 7 away - I could keep either 7 or Jornada
690 from
the surplus hardware pile we had after a project that used
them was
cancelled - and concentrated on 690 (hpcsh) instead 

SY, Uwe
-- 
uweptc.spbu.ru                         |       Zu Grunde
kommen
http://snark.ptc.spbu.
ru/~uwe/          |       Ist zu Grunde gehen

Valeriy E. Ushakov wrote:
[...]
> The problem is that the docs for the proprietary system
ASIC used in
> the Series 7/Netbook are not publicly avialble.  I
think Linux folks
> had a special deal with Psion PLC to get access to the
docs.

I do actually have Linux running on it (it's recompiling the
kernel right now,
very slowly), but it's a very old version and hardware
support is poor. I was
hoping that NetBSD's better modularity would give better
support for things
like the PCMCIA, which should hopefully be largely generic
SA1100.

Is there really not enough information available in the
Linux kernel source to
implement all this in NetBSD?

... time passes ...

Oh, dear. Comments in the Linux source code along the lines
of:

	/* What's this anyway? */

...do not inspire confidence.

[...]
> I gave my Series 7 away - I could keep either 7 or
Jornada 690 from
> the surplus hardware pile we had after a project that
used them was
> cancelled - and concentrated on 690 (hpcsh) instead


Yes, I scrounged mine from work too. I actually also got a
Victor MP-C101
hpcmips device too, but that's a story for another mailing
list. (NetBSD
doesn't run on that, either. Sigh...)

-- 
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