Familiar Linux is a distribution of the famous operating system designed to run on HP/Compaq iPAQ handheld computers.

I am gradually building up a FAQ, largely based on questions that appear frequently on the Familiar mailing list. There are only a couple of questions on it so far, but you can find it here. Submissions by email (questions with or without their answers) for inclusion in this FAQ are welcome.

Now that the MMC/SD card slot on the 3800-series seems to be working reliably (since about kernel 2.4.19-rmk6-pxa1-hh23, I think), I have moved my /usr and /home directories to my SD card. I've written quite a detailed Howto on the subject. It can be found here.
2004-02-22: This is now a bit out of sync with what I am actually doing on my iPAQ. I now keep a copy of a basic /usr directory in the onboard flash. While this takes up some space, it allows me to do a lot more with the iPAQ without the card inserted and makes the boot-up run smoothly without all the fiddling about discussed on the above-mentioned webpage. On the other hand I have a lot less free space in my onboard flash.

I bought a GSM/GPRS sleeve for my iPAQ, hoping to use the iPAQ as a mobile phone and to give me an Internet connection on the road. For a number of reasons, my efforts in this field met with only limited success. More information, including quite a bit of source code, is available via this page. Robert Woerle has revived this project under the name gomunicator, and plans to expand it to work with GSM CompactFlash card. More information can be found here

I have noticed that questions about how to backup the root filesystem from the iPAQ's flash memory in a form suitable for reflashing crop up reasonably regularly on the mailing list, so I converted one of the emails I sent answering this question into this web page.

I built a version of the 2.4.19-rmk6-pxa1-hh36 kernel with Brad Campbell's multi-sd patch applied (I'd link to the Familiar mailing list archive copy of his posting about this, but that archive appears to be broken at the moment). I have tested this on my 3870 with a 32MB aiwa brand MMC, a 128MB PQI brand MMC and a 256MB SanDisk brand SD card and while the new code is faster than the old, I didn't get the tenfold increase in write speed that Mr. Campbell reported from his tests. I also found that my 256MB SanDisk SD card is MUCH slower than either of my MMC's, especially my 128MB PQI card.
This directory (http://www.yargybot.com/Familiar) is set up as an ipkg feed providing packages of the kernel and modules. I have made them version -hh36.2, so "ipkg update && ipkg upgrade" should work even if you have the latest (-hh36 as I write this) kernel from the 2.4.19 feed.
If you DO already have an -hh36 kernel installed, then you only need to install the h3600_asic and mmc_base modules, which are both in the h3800-modules package (you will need to use the -force-depends option to install this package by itself, however).