This article is part of the OQO odyssey series – You can find the previous posts here, here and there.
If you think, the rest of the installation would be a cakewalk, you are under a misapprehension. But let’s talk about it one after the other.
I should start my report at kernel level which was the first big thing as I haven’t seen the WIFI Card or the Ethernet controller on the pci bus. But where is it? The answer is USB:
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 1557:0002 OQO model 01 WiFi interface
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 1557:0003 OQO model 01 Bluetooth interface
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 1557:7720 OQO model 01+ Ethernet
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Great. The info delivered from the lsusb command is as useful as windows error messages on a Linux environment. So all that helps now is googling for some more hints what they really did. After some hours I was sure: The Ethernet card turned out to be an ASIX AX8817X based thing while the wlan should be something like an Atmel AT76C505A USB WiFi.
Knowing the components it was quite easy building a suitable kernel. But how do we transfer our chroot stuff to the umpc? Our main problem there are our permissions we got to preserve. I have decided to do it the ‘tar’ way, abusing ssh for saving some space while unpacking:
tar cpf – * | ssh oqo “(cd /mnt/gentoo/boot; tar xvpf -)”
But you should take care of the disc first: If you unpack the archives over some existing files, you might run into troubles – at least I did: The device booted, but the next emerge ripped out many essential packages due to some strange things happening with the world file. So my advice would be formating the partition before doing that stunt!
The transfer went fine and just like a miracle the OQO booted. Wow. I could even log into the system for checking if things are ok. As I didn’t like the damn small keys, I just started up an ssh session to the device still being connected to my Ethernet card but sadly ACPI and WIFI refused to work.
Cursing doesn’t help here – so I continued my research which lead me to a package named net-wireless/at76c503a which should take care of my WIFI card. But did you notice the word ‘should’?
The next thing I’ll be doing is shooting some messages to some mailing lists for getting some hints. But I’ll keep you updated!
