Need for JZ4730 development platform with QWERTY and 7'' display?

Wolfgang Spraul wolfgang at qi-hardware.com
Tue Aug 25 08:14:22 EDT 2009


Hi Dr. Schaller and Nils!
very good to see you here...
We know about the Letux 400, like you said it's available in a lot of
countries under different names, for more information see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skytone_Alpha-400

I agree that we should pool development efforts, for developers the most
important thing to get started will be access to serial console, how
to reflash the device (can you do USB booting on the Letux 400?).
How do you build your rootfs?
We are using OpenWrt and can already boot a 2.6.31 kernel on the NanoNote.
See
http://github.com/lindnermarek/openwrt-x-burst/commits/x-burst

If you point people to the Letux as a development platform, the one thing
that makes me a bit nervous is that the Wikipedia page says the successor
has switched to a Marvell PXA27x CPU? And the next switch to a Chinese
ARM CPU (Jade Tech Z228) is already announced. Is that true?
Are you planning to come out with more Ingenic-based devices?

I think we should stick to a stable platform. The one thing software
development needs is a stable open platform and time.
There is a lot of ground to cover with the XBurst SoCs. The SIMD
instructions look very interesting, MPlayer source codes already exist and
need to be sent upstream. Boot time and power consumption can be optimized.
Etc.

We welcome all Letux 400 (and all other Skytone Alpha 400) developers
to the Free XBurst devices community, and we are happy to be a part
ourselves...
Wolfgang

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 12:40:50PM +0200, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:
> Hi all developers,
> I just realized that Qi hardware is focussing a lot around the new  
> MIPS SoC. So it could be interesting to get more real Ingenic JZ based  
> hardware to active (potential) developers who want to work on kernel  
> and user space software.
> 
> Maybe, our Letux 400 is the right thing to use as a (inexpensive) MIPS  
> target development platform. It is a small (7 inch, 650 g) "Netbook"  
> based on the JZ4730 (it was originally developed by SkyTone and is  
> essentially the same device that became broadly known as Razorbook).  
> Ard has collected a lot of reverse engineering results http://projects.kwaak.net/twiki/bin/view/Epc700/WebHome 
>   e.g. look here: http://projects.kwaak.net/twiki/bin/view/Epc700/HardwareLayout
> 
> Nils from www.kernelconcepts.de has worked heavily on a Linux kernel  
> and is mostly done. More links on this can be found on http://www.letux.org/wiki/index.php?title=Kernel_Development
> Main activity is on the mipsbook-devel mailing list (http://projects.linuxtogo.org/mailman/listinfo/mipsbook-devel 
> ). Looking into this material may benefit the NanoNote.
> 
> So if developers on this list are interested in getting more or less  
> compatible hardware, please contact me.
> 
> BR,
> Nikolaus
> 
> 
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