Pogo Tool for iPhone: Great for Wintertime

I belief I’d rise this Pogo Tool video recording review I did about a time period agone because I’ve remuneration the tool to be particularly accessible lately, since we’ve had no cold life in Gainesville, Florida where I live.

It can be really frustrative to not be able-bodied to use your iPhone with gloves on, so I’ve been carrying my Pogo Tool around in my pocket. Deeds like a charm.

Check out my video recording review of the Pogo Tool for iPhone.

P.S. Ten One Design nowadays has a couple new products:

1. Pogo Wittiness, a tool with a dilutant tip and a pocket clip
2. SoundClip, a small tactical manoeuvre that redirects the iPhone loudspeaker system sound, supposedly component it more than clear and audible

I’ll review the Pogo Wittiness and the SoundClip in the near future if I can get my workforce on them.

Microsoft suit concluded FAT patents could open OSS Pandora's Box

Microsoft has filed a patent offense legal proceeding against TomTom alleging that the tactical manoeuvre maker's products, including no that square measure Linux-based, go against on patents similar to Microsoft's FAT32 filesystem. This businessman the first time that Microsoft has unenforced its FAT patents against the UNIX papers, a move that no free software system advocates have

LCD operator finished?

I had a lot of trouble deed the LCD operator to work. Everything seems to be fine leave off that when I try to write to the storage device address range diffident for the LCD's letter of the alphabet tables, it doesn't register. It's as if no measure or no tactical manoeuvre hadn't gotten reversed on or something. Therefore, aft ratio openiboot from iBoot, the screen gets no screwed up.

However, if you load iBEC from iBoot, the screen doesn't get screwed up: you can still use bgcolor and everything deeds. I belief that meant at first here was something wrong with my LCD init encrypt. I worn out a frustrative day carefully auditing it for errors, and I did find deuce bugs that I fixed, but unfortunately it did not have some effect on the piping question. I got as right as I could with still methods so I definite to carry out a series of experiments.

First, I had no trouble chainloading iBoot and iBEC from openiboot. Here was a series of fails that I fixed along the way: trouble with USB send (just a tike literal error in the case), trouble deed the resultant thing to execute in storage device (you've gotta turn off the CPU caches, disenable MMU and interrupts for it to work properly. It also can't be run as part of an ISR because, well, iBoot expects to be able-bodied to receive interrupts, so I had to move the command business onto the piping thread and just have the ISR line up up commands for the piping thread to process). Anyway, those were eventually fixed.

My experiments showed that aft openiboot did its inits, chainloaded iBoot and iBEC was able to reinit the LCD properly (they had the European question). I constricted the question down to the place in power.c where I "turn off" the LCD mortal. This happened in the 114 iBoot, so I belief it was necessity. Analyzing the newer 2.x iBoots, that procedure was actually removed. Since I am reasonably self-confident that my syrah_init is functionally selfsame to their merlot_init and this that power init that when present, causes LCD init to fail in no cases and when abstracted, allows LCD init to win in no cases, I'm beautiful sure that's the problem.

So I went in the lead and removed it. This Gregorian calendar month or Gregorian calendar month not mean I am actually depending on the iBoot that I chainloaded openiboot from for the LCD init. We'll see aft I try to exchange iBoot entirely in the bootchain.

Anyway, USB is solid as a rock nowadays seemingly and chainloading seems to be excavation quite well. I'm actually able-bodied to load iBoot from NOR, patch it in storage device, and point execute it from openiboot. This probably instrumentation I'm ready to try flashing the thing again.

Point we'll see how well it truly works.

Boot agenda project is a go!

Aft a Brobdingnagian come of exertion and in-situ enquiry with iBoot (basically a positional notation large positional notation search done the encrypt, disqualifying no functions to see if I could figure out wherefore my LCD operator wasn't excavation properly), I managed to get it fully excavation. The question was three-fold: first, I forgot to write the first and last bytes of my letter of the alphabet tables: oops, but easily fixed. The second question was that apparently iBoot changes the SDIV of the measure in the middle of the data formatting process. I'm not even sure yet how galore inclination the change in measure relative frequency affects. It certainly unnatural the LCD, because before here was no sorts of flickering scanline unfamiliarity as one would reckon from a misconfigured clock.

Anyway, I converse the procedure that denaturised the SDIV and unenforced it. Seems to work fine nowadays. It's been ages since I looked into the measure speed stuff (beautiful little right when I first started this) so I can't say for certain, but I'm beautiful sure doing this increases the measure speed (which would make sense).

The LCD operator worked aft those fixes and I went onto write a simple framebuffer in a couple of time period, so we can finally get text-mode indefinite quantity on the iPhone screen. It was beautiful influential to me to get the screen excavation because even if we can boot a meat, I wanted the layman to feel like a full-fledged OS was running on the tactical manoeuvre, and that instrumentation display and I/O of no sort.

For a final cry, I also wrote no encrypt that lets us notice when the physical buttons (Home, Hold, etc.) were organism pressed down. From these pieces, it will be possibility to construct a in writing boot agenda restricted by those buttons. You could have one derivative to boot into the iPhone OS, and one derivative to go into openiboot command-line modality with that text-mode display.

The icon I posted is the electric current development exposure running on a first generation iPhone, with oibc (openiboot case) adjacent and running on my screen background computing machine. If you have a 2G iPhone or a first-gen iPod touch, you can try it out yourself by checking out the encrypt from Github and collection it (It's lone premeditated to be shapely on a UNIX machine. You'll be wanting no UNIX headers other). I wrote no alkaline notes on how to get it running inside the source tree, but this is not something you're anticipated to work with unless you're a fairly experience software engineer yourself.

Debian on iPhone UNIX

NAND activity is nowadays semi-reliable (although one has to be VERY heedful not to break in the tactical manoeuvre in the middle of a write operation), but it is decent to have something consanguine to a full-functional OS, supported by non-volatile storage.

Group concerned in the project should be familiar with the myriads of UNIX "distributions" floating around. An in operation system consists of deuce major domains: one is the meat, which is what manages the implements of war, and one is the userland which contains belongings like shells and otherwise UIs, bundle managers, etc. Software system that help users instal and run functional programs. Ubuntu is a democratic spatial arrangement that I run on my syntactic category machine. Humanoid could also be considered a spatial arrangement (though I disbelieve it has no apparently messy meat patches).

I definite that Debian would be an newsworthy thing to try, since we would point instantly have a userland and a pool of ready-compiled applications. Victimisation a slightly datable root filesystem Hera: http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2007/01/msg00034.html, a initrd and farther meat configurations were ample to get it to run. Frankincense, we can nowadays compile programs for iPhone UNIX on iPhone UNIX. The process is rather slow right to the business and uneconomical NAND tactical manoeuvre operator (pending a real FTL), but at thing theoretically, iPhone UNIX is nowadays self-hosting.

This should be beautiful little decent for those United Nations agency square measure more than into the userland development side of belongings to come in, possibly victimisation Debian as a base to build thing else (as I disbelieve it is standard enough).

I will be offer manual on how to get this no to work soon. The (restricted for gismo order terminal) rootfs is fairly sizable (around 130 MB), so I'm not sure how we'll handle spatial arrangement of that.