On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote:

> > IMHO what's left to really make this absolutely killer:
> > 
> > - get the lcd screen to blank when I close it
> 
> 	this can be done now, with 'screenblank' and the recent kernels.
> 
> > - emulate 3 buttons with the TP
> > - get 1 gig CF cards down to ~$300 (not microdrives)
> 
> - suspend & resume as well as WinCE does 
> - make it boot directly into *nix from startup
> 
> these last two items are really the sticking points for me... they're also
> nearly impossible, as I understand it. one would need to be able to replace
> the WinCE ROM with a carefully constructed *nix image (I believe Warner said
> that the resume depends on a jump to a memory location in ROM).
> I don't forsee anything like this soon, tho. :( (unless someone has a supply
> of SODIMM EEPROMs and a burner for them and some knowlege of how to boot
> this thing from the 'bare metal').

IIRC, the VR-Linux kernel actually has support built into it to boot off
of ROM and runs bare-metal to the z50.  I also recall reading that one of
the VR-Linux guys did, in fact, get this to work by burning his own
ROM.  So, I believe this *is* possible.

If this becomes more feasible, I would really like to see something like a
generic boot-loader / power-management stub burned into the ROM so that it
would work with multiple operating systems and would not be linked to a
particular kernel or OS version (e.g. create an extended 'BIOS' of sorts
on the ROM).
 
- Greg Hughes