A long-awaited project (awaited by me, that is) has finally come to pass with my successful installation of debian woody on my WebDT 360 (Geode LX800 model.) This machine has a low-power 500MHz x86 processor with a tightly integrated architecture, a penmount resistive touch panel, and mediocre I/O. Luckily it does have USB2 and good bluetooth, but the WiFi is in most cases a VIA vt6656 which until recently did not have a GPL-safe driver, meaning you have to build your own.
In fact I have not done this and at the moment am relying on a prism2-based Linksys 802.11b USB card. I had to track down atmel-firmware to get online, but that done things went remarkably well. Debian 5.0 "woody" works great, and this is the stable release. The newer release doesn't work for me (video problems) and it's hard to fit it in 512MB for the typical internal flash disk anyway.
Here are some hints in order on how to accomplish what I have done:
- Installing Debian: I installed from USB stick. I had to specify video=lxfb:800x600-16@60 and acpi=force to get video and hardware buttons working correctly, respectively. Once you set in BIOS (F1 after video initialization, many keyboards fail) to preserve the backlight brightness between reboots you can use the third button from the left and the Dpad to set brightness and have it actually persist between reboots. I installed the debian netinst to have a very minimal install. You have to chroot in and install wireless-tools yourself.
- Installing more software: I used matchbox-window-manager, you need libgtk2.0-0 for the pen calibration screen. Download the drivers from penmount.com but I am having problems with phantom clicks. I also installed gqview and deadbeef. Various config files are attached to help you figure all of this out. I installed seamonkey from their binary download for x86 to /opt/seamonkey. Copied gCal from penmount drivers to /opt/penmount.
- Fun tricks: mapping hardware keys (See attached file) start X at boot (use last example after dpkg-reconfigure x11-common and allow anyone to start X server) toggling keyboard and starting seamonkey browser once, see attached in usr/local/bin.
I hope to do a proper howto later, including CF adapter mod...
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| dt360.tar_.gz (2.85 KB) | 2.85 KB |
Dt168 as development system
Turns out I already had Debian Lenny on my Dt168, which is like a Dt360 but without LCD. Mine has 1GB storage (twice my 360) which helps a lot in development; I mounted my free University of Columbia USB stick (google around if you want one) as /usr. It unmounted itself once already, what a POS. I'm not depending on it for anything but building packages though. Takes the same video=lxfb... parameter at boot or else it does something weird, at least on this Janky old HP LCD I've got hooked up to it. But it is very much the same hardware since both machines are built entirely around the Geode and its companion chipset. I have a couple of bluetooth dongles to choose from as well, and my prism2 USB is on the machine right now, so it is a completely adequate testing and development system for the Dt360.
WebDT 360
Hi there Hyperlogos,
I've just inherited one of these and I bought a CF adapter (StarTech 1.8in 50 pin IDE to CF) and I am having a spot of bother getting the dt 360 bios (Insyde ACPI1.50.00) to spot the CF.
I am a newb when it comes to this stuff but the learning curve is getting a bit gentler.
They are a great bit of kit aren't they.
They WERE
They were a great bit of kit, but now they are antiques. I finally gave up and threw both pieces of mine into the trash. My current tablet is a Transformer Prime TF201 and it makes the Dt360 look like a piece of poop