This is set of tools for flashing ROM in Acer n30/n35.

All this stuff and text originate from Wieniget repository, text
it-self is slightli outdated!

To build everything, just run "make".

When that is done, connect the PDA to a USB port, power on the PDA
with the power button pressed and keep the button pressed until the
screen reads "DOWNLOAD IMG".  Then run "make dnw-n30" to flash Linux
onto the device.

* Status

The kernel now supports the Acer n30, Acer n35 and Navman PiN 570.
The Navman seems a bit unstable, so I would not recommend it for the
moment.

** What does work?

The LCD works fine.

The backlight works fine and uses the kernel backlight framework.

The touch screen works fine with the input framework.  
USB host works (n30), I've used both a USB keyboard and a PL2302 serial
converter with it.

USB device works.  I've been using it with the CDC Ethernet gadget
driver.

SD/MMC works including hot swap.  A 128 MByte SD card works fine, a
MMCPlus card doesn't: "mmc0: card has unknown MMCA version 4".  This
is probably a generic mmc problem.  If I patch the kernel to treat
MMCA version 4 cards as MMCA version 3 cards they seem to work fine.
I hope this won't break the card.

NAND flash works. (FIXME: stop working in recent versions)

Battery and "AC" status using the APM-bios emulation.

The serial port works, but you need a serial cable or a soldering iron
to be able to use it.

IrDA works.

Bluetooth on the n30 works.  On the n35 the same serial port is used
for a GPS that also works.

The hard buttons work.

Suspend to RAM works.

** What doesn't work?

Audio.  I haven't looked at audio at all.  To get audio working it
needs support in the s3c2410 and support for the UDA1380 audio codec.
Additionally there may be some GPIO pin that can shut off the speaker
amplifier.

Power management in general.  There isn't much power management done
at all.  There are probably a lot of things that can be done to save
power and give the unit a longer battery life even without suspend.

** Strange stuff

The touch screen is "noisy" on my n30 so I have to average a lot of
samples to get a good reading.  Is this the same on all n30s or is it
just mine?  After buying an Acer n35 and testing it seems to be all
Acer devices.

USB device is a bit shaky and hangs sometimes when the cable is
connected or disconnected.

There seems to be a limit on the initrd size for the bootloader.
Figure out why it is so.

** Interesting things

Power management.  There are probably a lot of devices on the n30 that
can save power by being shut down.  For example:

    B8, B9, B10 seems to control the LCD drivers.  It may be possible
    to save some power by shutting down the drives when the display is
    blanked.  If so, is there any special ordering requirements for
    doing this?

    E11, E12 are modified when Windows CE powers off.  What do they do?

    G1 indicates that something is connected to our USB device
    connector (probably by seeing of something is giving us +5V or
    not).  If G1 is low we can shut down the USB device port and if
    the USB host port is also off we can turn of the USB PLL.

    If nothing is connected to our USB host port, D+ and D- are both
    pulled down to ground.  If something is connected either D+ or D-
    is pulled up to +3.3V/+5V.  Can we detect this with the USB device
    suspended?  If we can, we can turn suspend the USB host port
    unless there is something connected to the port and if the USB
    device port is also suspended we can turn off the USB PLL.

    There is no code to turn of the USB PLL right now.  I wonder how
    much power can be saved by doing that.  Maybe it's possible to
    just run extclk directly to the USB parts when idling so that they
    kan keep their state machines alive while drawing very little
    power.

    Is there a way of shutting down the bluetooth chip?  There may be
    a GPIO pin or command that forces it into sleep mode?

    Is there a way of shutting down the IrDA transceiver?  There may
    be a GPIO that shuts down the transmitter or receiver.

    Is it possible to shut down the MMC port?  A GPIO?

    Is it possible to shut down the serial port?  The RS232 port has
    an auto shutdown, but it may be possible to force it to shut down
    or to wake up.

    Is there anything else that can be shut down to preserve power?

    Can the CPU enter SLOW or IDLE mode when it has nothing to do?
    I belive the current idle loop uses IDLE mode, SLOW mode could
    save even more power.  According to the data sheet:

        Typical normal power:   335 mW
	Typical IDLE power:	177 mW
	Typical SLEEP power:	 33 mW
	Typical POWER_OFF:    50 uA (at what voltage?)

    Is it possible to let the CPU enter a deep sleep mode where it
    waits for a GPIO pin to change?

    Is it possible to turn off /CE to the flash?  It will go to stand
    by mode if /CE is high.  This may already be done automatically by
    the nand driver.

Suspend to RAM works now, I found a way to get the GPIO configuration
during suspend so now I can get Linux to suspend to RAM and use as
much current as Windows CE does in suspend.  But I have no idea what a
lot of the GPIO pins do.

Reverse engineer the NAND partition table and BINFS format.  Figure
out how to use the existing bootloader so that it's possible to
upgrade the kernel and root file system from within Linux.

* Building a kernel for the device

** Prerequisites

These scripts to build an image for the n30.

A working cross compiler for arm.  I'm using gcc-3.4.1 built with Dan
Kegel's crosstool.  A patch for crosstool can be found in the archive.

This recepie for building crosstool was contributed by Guylhem Aznar
<[email protected]>:

    wget http://kegel.com/crosstool/crosstool-0.38.tar.gz
    tar zxvf crosstool-0.38.tar.gz
    patch -p0 < crosstool-0.38.diff
    cd crosstool-0.38
    edit the download tmp path and prefix to
    /opt/crosstool/gcc-3.4.1-glibc-2.3.3/arm-9tdmi-linux-gnu instead of
    /opt/crosstool
    ./demo-arm9tdmi.sh

An initrd.  The initrd I'm using can be downloaded from:

    http://zoo.weinigel.se/n30/downloads/initrd.gz

Note that my scripts won't work with a too large initrd.  An initrd
built from Arjans GPE image doesn't work.  I can't understand why, but
that's the way it is.  If someone fixes this, please let me know.

quilt -- you can patch the kernel by hand if you prefer

sudo -- or you can run things as root by hand

You may need to upgrade to the latest Windows CE version from Acer to
get the correct bootloader.  You can find the n30 firmware at:

    http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/handheld/n30.html
    ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/handheld/n30/osimage/

For the n35 the firmware can be found in:

    ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/handheld/n35/osimage

It's a pretty good idea to download this software anyways since it can
be used to reflash Windows CE again if you would like to get rid of
Linux (why on earth anyone would like to do that?).

To restore Windows CE using a SD card, follow the instructions in:

    n30 & n30 second edition sd card upgrade readme.txt

The same procedure works for the Acer N35 with the N35 firmware.

For the n30 it's possible to restore Windows CE over USB.  Extract the
file called Acer_n30PDA.ubi from one of the Acer_n30SE_v1.00.11_*.rar
files.  Then you can install Windows CE using the dnw tool the same
way you install Linux into flash:

    ./dnw Acer_n30PDA.ubi

see the Download section for more information on how to do this.

** Building

Unpack n30.tar.gz.

edit n30/Makefile to point at the cross compiler you're using.

Save the initrd you want to use as n30/romtools/initrd .

Download the 2.6.14 linux kernel and the H1940 patches that my patches
are based on by running the following from the n30 directory:

    make archive-download

If you prefer, look at the Makefile in the archive-2.6.14 directory
and copy the files there by hand.

Start the build by running the following from the n30 directory:

    make linux
    make romtools

This will unpack and build the Linux kernel and assemble a .ubi image
suitable for downloading to the n30.

** Downloading

To download the image to the n30, eject any SD/MMC card, press and
hold the power button while hard resetting the unit (turn on and off
the switch next to the sync connector on the unit).  Keep the power
button pressed until the display says "DOWNLOAD IMG".

Start the download by running the following in the n30/romtools
directory as root:

    ./dnw linux.ubi

The unit will be flashed with Linux.

If you want to put back Windows do the same thing with Acer_n30PDA.ubi
instead of linux.ubi.

** Running GPE or Opie from internal flash

Download one of the images from:

    http://anymore.nl/ipaq/files/graphical_images/

Boot using the initrd from my page.  Note that I have a new initrd.gz
which is 977778 bytes that can be downloaded from:

    http://zoo.weinigel.se/n30/downloads/initrd.gz

Erase the root filesystem part of the flash:

    flash_eraseall /dev/mtd3

Mount the flash as a jffs2 filsystem, this will also format the file
system:

    mount -t jffs2 /dev/mtdblock3 /mnt

Start receiving and unpacking the gpe image:

    cd /mnt && nc -l -p 4444 | tar xvf -

On your PC, do the following:

    ifconfig usb0 192.168.131.102

download the image with:

    bzcat path/to/gpe-image-arjan-20051207.tar.bz2 | nc 192.168.131.201 4444

or the corresponding for Opie.

Wait until everything has been written to flash.  If you want to run
opie, figure out which event device that corresponds to the touch
screen, by doing the following for each event in /dev/input on the
n30:

    od -x /dev/input/event0

Touch the screen.  When you see a lot of data you've found the device,
so modify the following file to match:

    /etc/profile.d/tslib.sh

Finally, unmount the filsystem:

    umount /mnt
    sync

[this is changed now and needs to be updated]

Modify romtools/create_tags.c so that switch (0) says:

    switch (5)

instead.  Run make in the n30/romtools directory to build the new
image and download the linux.ubi file as before.

** Booting GPE or Opie from a MMC card

Create an ext3 partiton on a SD/MMC card.  The following examples
assume that mmc2 is the ext3 partition.  If you use a USB adapter
it'll probably be called sda2 or something like that, but when the
card is inserted in the n30 it will be mmc2.

Format the ext3 partition with:

    mke2fs -j /dev/mmc2

Mount the partition and unpack the gpe image:

    mount /dev/mmc2 /mnt
    cd /mnt
    bzcat path/to/gpe-image-arjan-20051207.tar.bz2 | tar xf -
    cd
    umount /mnt

Modify romtools/create_tags.c the same ways as for the internal flash,
but use:

    switch (2)

Run make in the n30/romtools directory to build the new image and
download the linux.ubi file as before.

Insert the MMC card in the n30 and it should boot GPE/Opie.