Hi, sorry for taking so long... RL tends to mess up with plans ><

Anyway, you should try semery's suggestion first, if that fails I'll give the compilation a try.

Here is it:
http://computingplugs.com/index.php/CPU_idle_patch_from_Orion

My sheevaplug is running 2.6.30-rc6, I havent bothered to update to the final or .1, I am just lazy, and as they say: "dont fix what isnt broken".

As of the no login, I think it was written on de gentoo guide posted above, since I have the same line on my inittab (and I didnt have your problem, so I probably added it when installing)

Btw, I disabled every other terminarl (except one) since most I only use ssh and screen.

The unknown HZ value is nothing important, as mentioned in your post, the problem is the procps and certain power states (it is related to the system tick), I applied the patches for the power save and it has pretty much dissappeared from my install (running gentoo 2.6.30-rc5 if I remember correctly).

Well, it has to be a buggy driver, since the cards I've tried work perfectly with high speed readers.

what you say is that you want to boot the sheeva from a cdrom?
Right now you can do it from a SD, a USB or TFTP (network), so I see no reason for a live CD, what would be nice is to have a premade USB/SD image to just "flash" it into the drive and use it, not that I'd use it, I think this is being discussed somewhere in the forum.

there is no need for any native java driver, simply compile the kernel with usb<->serial support, the device will appear as a standard serial port (tty0, or something similar) and you can use it as a regular serial port, I am doing more or less the same, except the driver provides me with a ttyACM device (which is a serial port for cell phones), the access is done by running a program named stty which setups the serial port (rate, parity, etc) then all read/write is done like a regular file.

Almost every card works (SD or SDHC) the problem is a buggy high speed driver, simply disabling the high speed mode makes most cards work.

I am not exactly sure what you mean by "development environment"? As I understand you want a complete linux environment?

The mini plug cannot be used for serial communication, since its hard wired to the serial console of the plug (output only)
You can do what you want using a simple serial to usb converter (like those using FTDI chips).

I dont see that serialport has support for ARM Linux, if they provide source code you may be able to compile the native drivers, otherwise you are out of luck. I did some serial development in java on x86, and I found that the best solution is to interface directly to the serial device, however, I am not sure if it supports high speeds, or what it supports, since all I needed was slow communication with a modem (AT commands).

Finally, java on the plug is not good (at least I haven't been able to get a VM installed), ubuntu has one precompiled, but I don't use ubuntu, so I can't say if performance is good.

Hope this helps.

Does the SDIO patch solves the issue with high speed cards?

Thanks for the tip, I'll check it.

Any ideas on the radio listing?

Thanks

I compiled MPD in gentoo and it worked perfectly, check the wiki for more details, or there are a couple of posts in the forums about it.

In my opinion the best one is gentoo, while it is not easy to install (it requieres a fairly good understanding of linux) it has a bunch of documentation and it forces you to learn, also, since you setup it mostly by hand it gives you a lot of insight on the workings of the system. Another advantage is that with the USE flags you can control the size, functions and options of every application you install.
The main problems with gentoo are the difficult installation and the time it takes to install (since it has to compile pretty much all the system).

A last point of interest is that you have to compile and configure the kernel, which takes a couple of tries, but allows to have a very small and specific kernel, and you don;t have to wait until somebody updates/modifies the compiled images.

Thats my personal opinion, I used debian, ubuntu, suse and redhat on desktops, but after using gentoo I've been using it for pretty much anything, and the sheevaplug has worked perfectly well with it.

Talking specifically about gentoo+sheevaplug, the only problem I have found is that I can't get java to compile or find a suitable JRE/JDK.

Are you adding a delay, I think I read somewhere that you had to add a small delay before booting (5 secs?)

Yeah, I've found it unstable myself too :/
Thats a quite nice app, thanks for sharing