Re: HP Jornada 728 for everyday life?

"Valeriy E. Ushakov" [[email protected]] wrote: 
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 18:05:35 +0100, Emanuele Santoro wrote:
> 
> > - Using wireless, are there any limitations? I plan to use it at home
> >   (wpa/tkip pre shares key) and at school (open network! :-D), but not
> >   only: can i do wireless sniffing, packet capturing and similar things
> >   with a pcmcia wireless card?
> 
> Finding real pcmcia, 16-bit wifi card (not 32-bit cardbus) might prove
> to be a problem.  Old ones probably don't support WPA.  You can
> reflash a PRISM card with newer firmware that does support WPA, but
> unfortunately NetBSD wi(4) driver has not been converted to support
> it.

As far as I know, Cisco Aironet 350 series support WPA, and atleast
AIR-PCM352 member of the family is a 16bit card. Works great, but
I don't know about WPA support on the software side. Never had to
deal with it.

> > - How is APM/ACPI supported? What about standby and/or suspend to disk?
> 
> As far as I can tell it's not possible to support proper suspend in
> principle for the 7xx series.  The problem is that ARM CPU wakes up by
> doing a kind of reset, jumping to memory address 0, where WinCE ROM is
> located (and it is really read-only), so there's no way you can handle
> wake up.

Which turns out to be a quite annoying issue. Originally the device was designed
to suspend by taking the power off everything except the RAM, in order to keep
it's state. When the device is then turned back on, all the ram is there and the state
returns to where it was when we powered off. But while running a different os, the
WinCE loader at 0 has no clue about anything else than it's own business. Due to
the nature of ROM, the WinCE loader cannot be overwritten. 

What we do in our case, is that we drop the CPU clock rate (to somwhere around 
60MHz iirc) and power off the display. It looks like a normal stand by state, but it 
has a significant difference to an actual power off state. I've seen my device run on 
battery power for something around 14 hours, of which probably 3-4 hours was 
actual use. While with WinCE the device is capable of keeping the device with
one charge in stand by for somewhere around a month.

 -Otto

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