I need to clarify the situation with the ViA II and Linux. The ViA II system will run Linux. I'd sure like to know who you talked to at ViA because they should have been much more specific. The driver issue has to do with our hand-held display's touch system and with support for CardBus. We have not completed the development of a linux touch driver that uses the absolute positioning capabilities of the touch controller. The controller has two modes of operation, a relative mode and a touch mode. The standard mouse driver works fine with the touch controller except that it is inverted (i.e. the touch overlay has been rotated 180 degrees). Correcting this situation in the standard linux PS/2 mouse driver is quite simple. The absolute driver needs a bit more work. Quite frankly, we haven't completed the development yet because most users that are interested in running linux on the ViA II are interested in using a head-mounted display, such as the M-1. If you are not using the ViA II hand-held display and are using some other display and pointing device (such as a Twiddler) then you will be just fine. The other device driver issue is related to the CardBus controller. The driver development here is also not quite complete. If you are using standard PCMCIA cards you'll be fine. If you are using 32-bit CardBus cards, then a bit more development is needed. If someone is interested, I can certainly discuss the details with you. Kind Regards, Steve Case VP, Engineering ViA, Inc. -----Original Message----- From: David H. Silber [SMTP:] Sent: Saturday, December 05, 1998 11:15 AM To: Damon M. Conway; 'w-h' Subject: Re: ViA II question On Fri, Dec 04, 1998 at 11:32:31AM -0600, Damon M. Conway wrote: > So, how good is the M1? Anybody have any hands-on opinions? Also, anybody > get the ViAII to work with Linux or FreeBSD? I called up VIA, Inc and asked them about running Linux on a ViA II. It turns out that custom drivers would need to be developed. I suggested that if they publish the specs, perhaps someone would write (or modify) the necessary display & audio drivers. There is also a bootstrapping issue, but that has been dealt with by owners of floppy-less laptops. The original ViA has been reported to work with Linux (it uses a PCMCIA HDD, which makes installation easier) but that is out of production. The people I talked to impressed me. If I was willing to run Microsoft Windows on my wearable, I would buy a ViA II. Regards, David -- David H. Silber
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