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2.0 WANTS AND NEEDS

This section is mostly about the what and why I did what I did with my iPAQ. If you've already decided that you want Famintiopie on your iPAQ, you can skip this and go directily to Installation.

2.1 What do you want?

I started out with Familiar and QTopia as my first install. Wow! This was really cool! But at that time, QTopia didn't have a web browser package or an email package. Okay,...let's test out X-Windows. Now this is groovy. I got Dillo and Storm on it so I can check my email while perusing the web via a PPP connection through my Linux server.

Now, I was working on a project called WRATH (Wireless Remote Access Terminal Hardware). For more information about that, see http://www.deathkeep.com/wrath. I needed this PDA to do AX-25 over TCP/IP so that I can work it with my HAM radio. Unfortunately, nobody had made an ax-25 package which I could simply install. I had to compile my own AX-25 modules. Welp, I created a cross-compile toolchain so I could build these modules on a desktop PC, but I was running into many problems with that that I got frustrated enough to consider the very expensive CF card and compile the modules natively. Please note that these problems were NOT a result of the lack of documentaion on handhelds.org, it was simply my lack of experience in cross-compiling applications at that time.

Also, WRATH would be running an FTP server that would receive voice-mail mp3's that were sent from my base station. With only 64MB RAM, the need for file storage and native compilation of modules, I justified buying a 1GB CF card.


2.2 What do you need?

For the CF card to work, I needed an expansion sleeve for the iPAQ. Since WRATH was also going to need some peripherals, I went with the dual-card expansion sleeve that included an extra battery to power my extra devices. Expensive, but COOL!

This is a perfect hardware setup for Intimate; iPAQ, sleeve, CF card and NIC. Intimate allows you the full funcionality of a computer complete with gcc, g++, libc6, perl, the works. I compiled the AX-25 kernel modules that I needed along with the ax-25 tools that are used for packet radio. It was SOOO cool!

Intimate by default gets you going with the Blackbox window manager - a Very lightweight, customizable and useful interface for the PDA. But I still liked Opie, so I followed some instructions and got Opie to be my default window manager.


2.3 What do you REALLY want?

Finally, after getting everything working, I took a look at my completed work with pride and glee. One thing kept nagging me though; the expansion sleeve *is* a bit bulky. Please understand, what I have is a SMALL computer! One of the smallest that can be purchased on today's market. But the iPAQ with the expansion pack is as large as it can be and STILL be called a pocket-PC. A millimeter larger, and I wouldn't call it "pocket" sized.

Well, I COULD simply not take the expansion pack with me, but then I'd loose the funcionality I was looking for,....WRATH. So my solution came in a dream, well, not really, but it became obvious to me that I had to decide on what *IS* the purpose of my iPAQ, with, and without it's expansion sleeve.

I imagined WRATH being functional without the expansion sleeve, so I had to copy those modules, utilities and applications over to the ROM. Also, any other *necessary* applications for the functioning of WRATH needed to be copied over. This is what I ended up with on the iPAQ withOUT the expansion sleeve:

Now WITH my expansion sleeve and CF card, I was in BUSINESS! I have direct LAN connection via the NIC, which is WAAY faster than my 9600 baud radio connection. An album or two of my favorite mp3s, photo album of my pet rock to impress the women at the pub, AMPRS and satellite tracking, etc.

Basically I came down to the philosophy of:

Lastly, I configured WRATH to look the same whether with or without the CF card so that it would be transparent to me until I tried to run an app that's on the CF card when it's not there.


Now, onto HOW I did this...