Puppy on Tablet PC

[fluxnuk3r]

Hello all! I'm new to this forum (obviously), but I have some questions about a project I need to start working on more aggressively. I have 4 Hitachi Visionplates, they are tablet-type PCs with a Transmeta 400MHz processor and around 92 megabytes of ram. The internal hdd is a Compact Flash card, which is limited to the size of 256megabytes by the BIOS. There is a one-of-a-kind touchscreen, which comes in a .tar format and needs a 2.4.3 kernel to operate (all attempts to patch to 2.6 have been failures). For about 6 months I have been looking for a distro that I can base the system on and build up from. Essentially, this is what I need:

Puppy Onebone with 2.4.3 kernel (which, if things work at all, I will recompile to the hardware), installed on the CF card as an actual writable hard drive (to allow for editing). After editing, I would set the boot manager (syslinux or grub) to mount the drive as read-only to preserve write cycles. I haven't seen much documentation on Onebone as to whether or not gcc is installed and is capable of installing programs from source. I would have to have that to get anywhere. Programs needed: kdrive (faster and smaller Xorg), Twindy (window manager ideal for tablets), touchscreen driver, firefox, wireless module (wireless card is actually quite Linux-compatible, other distros such as DSL and Slax, although horribly slow and cumbersome to use on this automatically load the wireless card with ease). Pidgin, AbiWord, some sort of configurable onscreen keyboard like gok, keybindings editor for the few keys it actually has. Not sure if some sort of login screen is possible. There is a biometrics scanner program that can be used on a touchscreen computer, but I am not sure if it would be possible to set that up as the login or not.

The original operating system was Midori Linux, an outdated, uneditable, ugly but very fast-booting system. It uses firefox 1.0 (if you're lucky) and has no real use but browsing the web without support for CSS or javascript, which makes things horribly slow. The batteries are quite good and actually tend to last longer when not using Midori.

If anyone has read this far and thinks it is at all possible to accomplish this with Onebone Puppy, I would greatly appreciate any suggestions or comments. If/When I get this accomplished I will host the CF images on my server for free download by other frustrated Visionplate users. Thank you much!

[tempestuous]

Regarding the touchscreen driver (kernel module) you need the "mk712" which Puppy 4.0 and 4.1 already contain ... but I don't know if Onebone has this module.
You really need to find out what kernel version Onebone has, as such

Code: Select all

uname -r

This will determine what compiler tools (devx) are compatible. If Onebone is old, these tools may not be available any more.

Programs needed: kdrive (faster and smaller Xorg)

Well you would need to compile TSLib before the touchscreen will work under Kdrive.
Touchscreens will generally work better under Xorg.

There's a HOWTO for Puppy 4.0 here -
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... ost3319298

When you get to the section about installing "Evtouch" Xorg input module, get it from here
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 090#106090

[fluxnuk3r]

Thanks for the fast reply. If Xorg works, I'll use Xorg instead. You didn't however touch on how I am supposed to install/configure everything. If its a live system, I can't really do that. I want to do more than just have a partition where it saves changes at. I have looked at puppy remastering guides but they only seem to show how to remake the cd iso, and how to add, not take away programs. Is Puppy close enough to change out kernels from one iso to another? How should I go about installing this first in a way I can make the needed changes?

BTW, I am phantom_cyph on that forum (LinuxQuestions.org).

[tempestuous]

You didn't however touch on how I am supposed to install/configure everything.

Configuration of the touchscreen is explained in the link I provided, but it's all second-hand information to me, since I don't own such hardware myself. I only provided the Evtouch Xorg driver.
You need to get your hands dirty and do some testing/experimentation yourself.

Is Puppy close enough to change out kernels from one iso to another?

No. For too many complex reasons to explain.

I have looked at puppy remastering guides but they only seem to show how to remake the cd iso, and how to add, not take away programs.

Yes, you're generally correct. This is basic remastering.
More advanced remastering is achieved by using the Puppy-Unleashed build system. I recommend this for you. You can create a stripped-down version of Puppy which is based on the latest version, and customised for your situation.

The ultimate in remastering is to build Puppy from scratch exactly the way that Barry does, but this requires advanced Linux skills.

[raffy]

I've looked at the repositories, and it looks like the barebone 1.04 ISO is difficult to find. No problem using the official ISO based on 2.4 kernel, as Puppy will simply mount the user sfs and free up your RAM. Version 1.08 is here, and version 1.09 is there (this has Firefox).

(I dimly recall that Vector can be used for compiling packages in Puppy 1.xx versions, but tempestuous knows more about that.)

[Aitch]

Hi fluxnuk3r

some useful info here:- [puppy gets a mention]

http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/showthread.php?t=14947

Aitch

[vik]

Hi fluxnuk3r!
Sorry for late reply - I just find your post.
I'm using Dingo on Hitachi VisionPlate (128Mb RAM) for about 5 months.
Works fine. Almost all out of box - WiFi, audio, video. Need some tweaking of xorg.conf for touchscreen. Just modprobe mk712 (included in Dingo) and evdev (also included). Need evtouch for xorg (not included see http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=16518 ).
Tried without success Puppy 3.01. May be video driver for siliconmotion screwed in xorg 7.2 (as I understand 4.0 uses xorg 7.3)
You can found my xorg.conf here (sorry, discussion is in Russian ) http://forum.puppyrus.org/index.php/topic,320.30.html

P.S. kernel need acpi=off and ide=nodma. I tried CF 128Mb, 1Gb, 2Gb, 4Gb, 8Gb - all works, except Microdrive Seagate ST1 6Gb.