I spent a lot of time this weekend hacking about with the Psion. I found the whole thing a bit wierd because some stuff was mind-numbingly easy and other bits well tricky. My 64mb Compact Flash card does not work, so I will have to return it and ask Dabs for one that does. Pending that I have had no storage space and so nowhere to actually install Linux to properly.

This is is a big issue, the Psion itself only has 300k free after loading the PsiLinux ramdisk image. Maybe I should try the non-CF one as it may be smaller.

The ramdisk image is interesting. It contains busybox, a single binary responsible for many of Unix’s traditional little commands, like sh. It also contains a custom init, one that doesn’t seem to want to use an inittab. This has so far prevented me from setting the Psion up as a serial terminal, which would be really useful. More useful still would be SLIP across the PC connection. Then I could just plug it into any machine (assuming Windoze boxes can do SLIP fairly easily) and telnet into a Unix box.

My main focus is comms stuff at the mo as I have no space to bother doing anything. I don’t even have space for a compiler, which sucks ass as I need to build loads of stuff.

I want to get Microwindows up and running, and a hundred thousand other things, but they all take disk space. One thing that did occur: If I get SLIP up I might be able to export some of my desktop’s disk space to the Psion through NFS, or any other sharing platform, which would be dead handy.

Guess I’ll phone Dabs for now though…