DT300 Info

Post Reply
henderson101
Newbie
Newbie
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Jul 25, 2011 4:29 am

DT300 Info

Post by henderson101 »

Hi All,

Well, this is pretty cool. I see you guys are using DT Research Webpads to do cool stuff! Excellent!

So anyway, point of me joining - to add a name to the list: DT300. This was a prototype unit. It contained a Geode (266MHz, can't remember exact model) and had soldered RAM (I think it was 256MB, I don't remember exactly), was pretty much the same size as the Dt325 (which was the production model.) It had a weird RANGELAN wireless card on a mini ISA bus (ISA I kid you knw - try finding any cards for that spec, like, anywhere!!) The device had a single internal CF card slot - you needed to dismantle the entire device to get to it!!! The Wireless was pre standards, and was incompatible with any modern standards (not even 802.11A.)

So, here's the slightly cool part - it didn't run Windows CE... it ran... BeIA!! For those that don't know, BeIA was the Internet Appliance version of the BeOS. It booted to a web based interface, but with a little hacking it would boot to a full BeOS style desktop. Lot's of cool stuff was possible. I used to own one that was a former QBit branded sample unit. The motherboard was jumpered like crazy with wires to work around engineering issues. It was pre production, the battery was pretty much dead. I needed some money, so I sold it. With I still had it!!

So, I have the tools to build the images for the CF card - if anyone wants to try it on a DT325 or possibly DT310 (I guess) they might work. I doubt Wireless will, but it's still cool to mess about with.

More info:

This Wiki lists the Dt300 and 325 as being compatible devices:
http://wiki.bebits.com/page/BeIASupportedHardware

Big long discussion about BeIA and the Dt300 back from when I was an owner:
http://forums.begroovy.com/index.php?topic=4384.0

What is BeIA:
http://web.archive.org/web/200106080926 ... iafaq.html
quotaholic
Administrator
Administrator
Posts: 569
Joined: Tue Mar 24, 2009 9:11 pm

Re: DT300 Info

Post by quotaholic »

Thank you for your post!

For a while we had a repair tech who worked on DT's on a daily basis posting here. They knew the hardware quite well however this is the first time I have heard of this model. Very interesting indeed. Haiku has come up here in the past however the touchscreen having proprietary drivers and no BeOS support limited applications.

You sound like you are very familiar with BeOS. May I ask, is it possible to port over the linux source of say the touchscreen driver to BeOS? I recently learned we can use tslibs, a common touch calib, to make the calibration. The combination would overcome one hurdle.

I was quite impressed with the feature sets on the releases you linked. I remember some old programmers recalling their days on BeOS as some of the best memories. I may just want to look in to this further and possibly make a couple builds if I knew touchscreen support could exist. VLC even supports BeOS. That would be so cool to take to the local lug meeting.

quotaholic
Post Reply