On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Eric Jorgensen wrote:
> I just aquired a strange little ARM based box. a set-top system,
> marketed by Curtis Mathes, manufactured by Uniview (www.uniview.com).
> Model "210".
Bad luck. :-)
> I'd like to see if i can hack linux onto it. Any thoughts?
Yeah. Join the club: see the `armlinux-uniview' list at
<http://www.armlinux.org/>. I've written a serial block driver which
uses the new `ioctl' and DeviceFS-style interface, so you'll be able
to get PPP running under RISC OS, at least.
There's also a bunch of hacks floating around to report binary numbers
using the LEDs, and stuff.
The main problem at the moment is that the hardware watchdog is set off
when RISC OS loads and no one can find out (and ART won't reveal) how,
if at all, you can stop it. Unfortunately the interval between `ticks'
is too low, and not long enough for the kernel boot phase to complete;
this means that the watchdog ends up resetting before Linux starts.
Unfortunately I think the ticker code is within the kernel under RISC OS,
so there's no immediately apparent way to stop it. There may be a CMOS
bit, thinking about it, but I don't know what.
There are quite a few other Debian developers with these boxes, most of
whom are on the list; Randolph Chung, Jim Pick and a few others I've
forgotten now. There are some screenshots out there of a Uniview
upgraded to run the latest WindowManager and generally look very pretty.
With no great networking capability to speak of (PLIP's probably the
best bet), there isn't a particularly great future for these boxen;
they'd probably manage as an MP3 jukebox, streaming over NFS, though.
c.
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