Yet another enabled Hardware/Gadget enabled for Linux 
Since i use my WS-2300 professional weather center under Linux with the open2300 framework of course i also created a package for it on my openSUSE buildservice home project.
Thanks to a community member who has a similar WS-2308 model and also wanted to use it with my open2300 packag i was given remote access to debug his hardware. So, those packages now even support this weather center also known as “Matrix II”.
Archive for April, 2008
Weather Center WS-2308 with Linux
Monday, April 7th, 2008Enable Option GE 0201 and GT 0201 with UMTSmon
Sunday, April 6th, 2008Some UMTS/G3 cards currently still have a problem with umtsmon as it has a usage pattern of the ttyUSB ports of those cards that makes them act very strange or even don’t work at all with them. While there is a simple workaround to let umtsmon only use their first port via the ‘-s’ parameter this is very annoying as it won’t allow umtsmon to update the signal strength display while its connected.
Klaas (the author of umtsmon) is already working on a “good” fix, but this patch at least for now can give you a working Option GE/GT 0201 card with also a updated status/signal strength display.
Currently umtsmon (in usual two port mode) uses the 2nd port (usually ttyUSB2) to send AT-commands to the card while the first one (usually ttyUSB0) is used for the ppp connection. So the second one can still be used to query the signal strength for example. But it seems some cards like the Option GE or GT 0201 can only do the ppp connection on the port where the final ATD(T) command was issued.
So the one port workaround also will make this happen, but the attached patch will do so with still using the second one later on while connected.
Once this is fixed by Klaas neither the one port workaround nor this quick dirty hack is needed, but for now i thought perhaps maybe someone might also find it useful.
MMC cards on Ricoh internal cardreader RL5c476
Sunday, April 6th, 2008If your notebook has a Ricoh RL5c476 controller which also provides the MMC host adapter R5C843 you got quite some trouble getting access to real MMC memorycards with the internel cardreader. But already since upstream kernel 2.6.25-rc1 there is patch from me included that’ll solve this problem for you by extending the ricoh_mmc driver accordingly.
Should you still encounter problems with mmc cards on this controller i’ll be very happy to get some feedback from you.
Nozomi (UMTS/3G) driver improved
Sunday, April 6th, 2008The nozomi driver in the upstream kernel in the meantime got some nice improvements. Especially a patch from me (available since 2.6.25-rc6) fixed a stability problem when accessing the card extremely early after insertion (e.g. when doing constant polling on /dev/noz* devices). The driver now contains a simple state management allowing access not until the card is really ready for it.
Since this change i consider the driver to be extremely stable. I wasn’t able to trigger any problems with it on a lot of very cruel tests. If any of you still sees problems with your nozomi card, please let me know it!