Eee Note kernel hacking

As a complete and utter newb on this- you guys are attempting to essentially run a different OS on the eeenote, right? I've often thought, with it's outdoor screen, very light weight, good battery life, and Wacom screen, that it would make a great digital sketchbook if it could just produce smoother anti-aliased lines. My understanding is that's one of the benefits of what you're trying to build? That one might be able to run certain programs that run on Linux/ Windows, if you could get the note to run something different? I've slowly followed this conversation as a silent observer for months, and was curious how it might actually affect how the note could be used, from a laymans/ artists perspective.

 

Also having keyboard support. The Asus' one is terribly slow and wastes my time. There's a lot of cheap micro-usb keyboard on the internet. The problem would be with the driver. Isn't easy to implement it as a module ?

 

2Steve B:
As for me, i'm just interested in running some different environment (X11, Android?) on EeeNote... Why? Because stock firmware is very limited in its abilities and it has closed source, so we can't fix some stupid things (like slooow keyboard) even if we want. And also I want to have faster sketching app on EeeNote with at least the same functional as original one.
What I mean saying 'faster'? If you hadn't ever tried to run "ts_test" app (which comes with tslib used to calibrate Wacom digitizer), you may want to try That is really fast (it doesn't make any antialiasing, so loads CPU only by 5-7%).

From an artist's point of view, everything depends on the software we can run on EeeNote.
Under X11, I know only one sketching app suitable for our device, which is Xournal. It is nice in its capabilities, however, at the moment, X11 itself uses up to 45% of CPU while just moving "mouse" pointer, so while sketching the latency is huuuge and everything lags
As for Android, I expect there are more such applications, but under Android 2.3, in running which I've succeeded, you shouldn't expect any robustness.

2etienne:
Do you mean connecting external USB keyboard ?
Probably, you CAN do this, but it is not as convenient as you may thought
HID drivers (USB keyboards, mouses and so on) are already in the kernel, but there is no USB host/client switching support in the original ASUS kernel.. I was going to implement one in my custom kernel, but at the moment i haven't done yet.

Also, EeeNote can't provide +5V supply for external USB device. It can't provide any power via its microUSB (maybe because it was not intended to be used as host?), so to use some external USB device (such as keyboard) you should carry battery pack together with it..

I'm not sure, but I suppose that virtual keyboard mechanism the Qt Embedded provides is not slow in nature. The slowness of Asus' keyboard may be considered as a bug in keyboard module itself.
I'll try to make some sort of simplest custom virtual keyboard shortly and see what latencies I can achieve.

 

... I was just passing by this thread, as I do every now and then, and, well... I know I'm not of much use there but:

GO RomaVis! Go RomaVis! Go! Go! Go!!!


Should have been cheerleading in my youth, I clearly have a thing here. Thanks so much RomaVis.

 

That's what I was worrying the most about. I wasn't sure it could provide power for keyboards. Are you sure it can't provide power? Usually, some tablets with android do (I don't see what they could have been designed for except host too).

Concerning closes sources. Asus has the habit to share their sources after a while. Why they wouldn't share sources of the virtual keyboard that contains no third library (they shouldn't). If we gently ask their sources, maybe they will be kind because we are good customers.

Also GO RomaVis! Go RomaVis! Go! Go! Go!!!

 

Hey man, any update on this? I have been having a borrowed EA-800 in my hands for nearly a year now. I managed to compile Quill and some other stuff (which I posted on this forum) a while ago. I reckon that a new kernel would really put me back into the hacking game!

 

I'm sorry, but there were no updates since June, if i remember correctly. Most of things are supported, and now it's time for userspace hacking I'll finish touch keyboard support when I'll be at home if someone really needs it.

As for the source, i've finally made it available on github: https://github.com/RomaVis/eeenote-kernel , and if I am going to modify something, the most recent version will always be there.

And I'm sorry again, because I am on some sort of vacation, being unable to physically access EeeNote since the end of July

 

Hello,
at first sorry for my english, but i hope it is readable

@RomaVis
your work is wonderfull !!!!!!!
I have try to compile your eee note Kernel from your git Source but i don´t know which kernel config do you us.
I choose in menuconfig -> "i'm not sure" -> Asus note ae800 and the kernel compression LZMA than i have compile it with the Cross compiler from Ubuntu.

next step is copy the kernel image in arch/arm/boot/zImage to the sdcard an plug in asus eee note and type dd if=zImage of=/dev/mss/blk0p3, in the next reboot i brick the asus.
I have restore the original kernel from here and my asus running normal.

How i can config the kernel source and copy the customer kernel to the asus?!

best greez

 

is it ok to unzip the file to the sd card(fat32) and put in the internal card's place?
will it work?
or format that sd card as ext3?

 

I am pretty sure you have to compile (or cross-compile in this case) it first.