Well after the joys of watching linux boot and the effortless networking it was time to setup my modem.

However -- there's that word again! -- anyway, lspci -vv shows this delightful piece of information.

Communication controller: Conexant HSF 56k HSFi Modem (rev 01)
Subsystem: Conexant Unknown device 2003

Well thats somewhat to be expected, however these Conexant modems are loved by few in the land of Linux being WinModems and all.
(For those who don't know WinModem is marketing slang for cheap piece of crap that should never have been allowed into the market place) ;-)

So anyway I'll just browse Ebay and my local places and grab a nice proper voice modem. V92 with all the features if I'm Lucky.

Anyhow, we progress.
Cheers.
D.

Nice, effortless networking!

I edit the etc/rc.d/net file as per the Crux handbook and thats it. The system finds and is issued an IP address from my dhcp server.

I can even ping my ISP's website.

Lovely.
D.

Yay! Exams and Assignments are over. No more uni things for a few weeks.

After some quality time yesterday and today, I finally have EFIKA booting Crux Linux.

I had no end of hassle with the flash drive boot process for Debian and others. Simply put, I have my old flash drive and my partners new one and no matter what, the drives would be detected by the EFIKAs firmware but the files would NOT ever be seen on the drives. I tried formating and repartitioning, fat16 and fat32 and the firmware would simply never show or boot as if a file was on those drives.

Anyhow, I cobbled togeather an old pc and a Kubuntu Fiesty bootcd and untarred the cruxppc flash drive image onto the root partition of my 2.5" hard drive.

I placed the hard drive into the EFIKA (fits like a glove) and whoohoo linux booted.

It complained about the file system on the first boot -- due to the clocks / time stamps on each machine I think -- and on the reboot it just works.

I commend the Crux PPC team on their excellent product.

Nice.
:-)

Well, "the next day or two" turned into a couple of months!

My uni demands are very high at the moment. I have a number of assignments, tests and reports all due quite close together. So my minimal free time has disappeared into fat air.

With my son also on holidays this last week and this coming week, getting free time and silence is close to nil.

Excuses Excuses, I know. I believe I resolved the flash drive issues, thanks to some comments in the forum about all files on fat32 flash drives needing to be in capitals.

Hopefully with that info and my 2.5" hard drive that I liberated from my old thinkpad, I will 'hopefully' get to boot linux and get on with my telephony goals.

D.

Well, finally I had some free time. Where does it all go?

Anyway, I set up the EFIKA with a spare atx power supply and a null modem cable I whipped up on the weekend.

Minicom messed me about a little bit, the config file options were less than intuitive. But after a fair bit of trial and error and reading in the forums, I picked up my error and can now see the EFIKA boot process.

I do like this firmware, neat tidy and very fast. :-)

So I started trying to get the Debian install to do its thing off my usb flash drive.

This doesn't work. It's odd because when I boot with my flash drive in the machine, devalias clearly lists the drive and the hd designation.

However, the files on the flash drive do not list. It just comes up as empty. Strange! Shutdown the EFIKA and check the flash drive on my Linux box, all is good; files are there.

Okay, what next.
This time around, I am going to put a little partition on my 2.5" hard drive and see if I can get on with the install.

Well, thats the goal. Will see how that goes in the next day or two.

D.

My EFIKA arrived in Perth, Australia having come all the was from the USA in perfect condition. Nice.

Special thanks must go to both Genesi and Freescale for their sponsorship of our projects!

It's not until you have one of these babies in your hand that you truly appreciate the elegance of these small beasties. The photos somehow do not convey how small these boards actually are.

Due to my finances, Christmas and new year, things have moved a little slowly. {I have had the EFIKA since before Christmas}. That is now changing.

I have a nice little 1 Gig 2.5" hard drive that I liberated from my old laptop. This is only until I can see how much space I will need. Once I know, I will get a flash drive and adaptor as described in my previous blog.

The hard drive has been partitioned in preparation for bringing up linux.

I now have my serial cable and ATX power supply.

This weekend I hope to get my linux box connected to the EFIKA via serial cable and then bring up the base linux system.

More Soon.
Cheers.
D.

I was privileged to have my project approved. Whoohoo

So, my outline of a plan once I have the hardware is as follows.

1. Bring up a basic linux system -- Gentoo?
2. Bring up the networking system.
3. Get simple ssh access across ethernet working.
4. Configure my voice modem.
5. Trial a simple voice mail system to prove all of the voice modem subsystems. This will be based initially on the vgetty and mgetty software.
6. Setup caller side menu interaction.
7. Once functional, explore options in redirecting voice to headsets. Initially just a headset pluged into audio ports (headphone / microphone).
8. Setup bluetooth dongle with 2 bluetooth headsets and determine how to dynamically redirect an incoming call to either headset.
9. Optimisiation
-- Attempt rebuild of functional system with uClibc. -- Attempt to reduce footprint of entire system to a very small compact flash card size.
-- Explore compact enclosure and compact power supply options.

Comments.
This all essentially follows my initial presentation, however I have some concerns with Asterisk. Many linux user groups have comments that Asterisk requires much setting up.
This may mean that Asterisk my be difficult to port / bring up on new hardware.
I will pursue the Asterisk port if other options become restrictive or overtly complex.

D.