[Peeweelinux] Almost working, newbie needs a couple of

[Leif Steinhour]

Background: I'm trying to put Pee Wee on Norand 6110 and 6100 handhelds 
(they are like the ones UPS guys use) so that I can add them to our store 
of available devices (a HOWTO will be coming when I have them working). My 
build environment is a Red Hat 7.2 / 2.4.17 setup with an ISA PCMCIA 
bridge. I'm using regular 256MB PCMCIA Sandisk flash cards. I've got the 
pwlconfig script loading fine onto the target hardware and believe the 
custom kernel script is working as well. In my build script I've tried to 
include syslog and turn on as much logging as possible but may have 
screwed that up. 

Here goes:

1). (Easy/Dumb) The 6110 starts up and then immediately shuts off, 
possibly due to a power issue. Attaching it to the docking station results 
in bringing up the lilo boot menu, and pressing return loads the kernel 
and gets it to a screen with a bunch of startup and routing (which is 
strange because I've not installed any networking either in the kernel or 
the packages) information but it halts there with no login prompt. I'm 
guessing it's getting to a serial console? but don't really know. It's 
probably worth noting that it does this regardless of what drive I set the 
"boot device on target system" to be (I've tried hdc, hde, hdf so far), 
which is weird. 	When I take the PCMCIA cards out and put them back 
in my host computer after having done that the /var/messages "file" is not 
a file and is not readable. For starters, if there is any trick to getting 
regular bootup information viewable after a boot I'd sure love to hear 
about it.

2). (Intermediate) The 6100 has a dos 5.x ROM, so I think I have to use 
loadlin as my bootloader: when I try to use the FAT 16 / ramdisk setup, 
the unit won't seem to recognize the partition as bootable. Has anyone 
used loadlin with pee wee? I looked at the FAT 12 partition that the 
script is creating for the booting off of and it looks like something 
similar is going on, but I think the norand hardware needs an autoexec.bat 
file in order to get loadlin working.

	Thanks in advance for any help, and thanks in general for all your 
work previously. I have benefitted tremendously from looking at the 
archives.