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While Familiar Linux on an iPAQ is still damn cool. There’re some issues with my iPAQ:

• Sound doesn’t work. Yeah I read the release notes, yeah all the right modules are loaded, just no sound.
• None of the USB stuff works. Selecting the “Storage” or “Serial Port” options nets you first missing kernel modules and then when you’ve fixed those, you get unresolved symbol usb_gadget_unregister_driver errors. I assume there’s yet another missing kernel module that wasn’t in modules.conf.
• Bluetooth management is, um… lacking. Configuring a GPRS modem was a two day hunt through Google and it felt like Linux circa 1999. pppd is an abomination and while the rfcomm bluetooth stuff wasn’t so bad, there doesn’t seem to be any “right” way to save pins, so you have to rebind after reboots. There needs to be some real work in this area.
• Syncing to non-Linux systems is pretty much pointless.

Yes, I’ll be “escalating” these to the mailing lists after Turkey-day.

Ok, so I’ve collected a few tweaks I made to my iPAQ:

• Make the SD card mount at boot. For unknown reason, the SD card support is funky on the H39xx machines. The Familiar Release Notes covers how to do this (way down in the 0.8.0 section).
• Take advantage of the extra Flash ROM in the H39xx machines. There’s an extra 16 megs of space in these (48 megs total) that isn’t used by default. Check out this howto. I mounted it under /usr/local.
• It looks like they trimmed down the packages on 0.8.4, but in doing so a lot of stuff is missing… like nmap, gpsd and what looks to be a gaggle of others. I added the 0.8.2 base feed to my feed list and this seems to work well.

More to come, I’m sure.

Last week my boss at work finally handed down his beloved Compaq iPAQ H3975 to me. It took me all of about 3 days to realize that “Windows CE for the Pocket PC 2002″ is the Windows 95 of the Windows Mobile family and that anything worth running wasn’t supported under it.

So, I did what any self respecting geek would do, I installed Familiar Linux 0.8.4.

My initial reactions were unabridged giddiness. Familiar Linux (along with GPE) is pretty much a full-on Gnome-based Linux workstation… only really small. I was in heaven, I had better hardware support (try finding decent Prism2 drives for WinCE PPC 2k2) and more “normal” applications like ssh and a web browser that doesn’t suck.

Slowly the cracks are beginning to appear. The H39xx series isn’t supported very well by the 2.6 kernel so the 2.4 kernel is retained for these. There are occasions where a reset is needed w/o warning and other such bumps.

Still, to be able to run Kismet from the palm of my hand, now that’s something!