Klaasjan's Linux7k pages

This site contains some text and binary files that are relevant for running Linux on the Psion Series 5 and Geofox PDAs. Both are based on the Cirrus Logic CL-7110 chip, hence the name Linux7k.

For more information on the project see the home page at www.calcaria.net and linux-7110.sourceforge.net, and the Linux on Psion project at Sourceforge.

The most relevant file here probably initrds3.gz in the initrds subdirectory. It supersedes initrds2.gz, Both are initial ramdisks, intended for bootstrapping a Linux system on the S5/Geofox. Their main claim to fame is that they contain working versions of fdisk and mke2fs, so that a Compact Flash card can be partitioned and formatted for Linux. Initrds3 also contains working utilities to transfer files (stty, rz, sz) setup an ip connection (ifconfig, slip), and test the touch screen (ptscal, tscal). For a description on how to use it, see, e.g. Jan Kybic' page. }

initrds3 contains the following commands: [ ar basename busybox cat chgrp chmod chown chroot chvt clear cp cut date dd deallocvt df dirname dmesg dpkg-deb du dumpkmap dutmp echo elvis false fbset fdisk find free grep gunzip gzip head hostid hostname id ifconfig init kill killall ldconfig length ln loadacm loadfont loadkmap logger logname ls lsmod makedevs md5sum mkdir mke2fs mkfifo mknod mktemp more mount mv nc nslookup ping printf ps ptscfg pwd rm rmdir rmmod rz sed setkeycodes sh sleep slip.arm sort stty sync syslogd sz tail tar tee telnet test touch tr true tscal tty umount uname uniq update uptime usleep uudecode uuencode vi wc which whoami yes zcat

And all this in under 1MB! (compressed).

Notes on how some of the binaries on the initrd were built can be found in the directory buildnotes, while an earlier attempt based on Alex Holden's flatcap is in the flatcap-ul directory.

More info: see initrds/README, and initrds/sources.txt. The latter also has more URLs to the parts from which all of this was assembled

NOTE: some of the older linux7k glued kernel images have problems with initrds larger than 512k. Crash+burn-25 (cb-25) and higher should be ok, but the 'stable-221-cb23-519-psi.gz' kernel may have problems. See Werner Almesberger's messages dated Sept 22, 1999 and Nov 30, 1999, on the linux-7110 mailing list. You have been warned.

Klaasjan van Druten (klaasjan@europe.com).

August 2000.