PRS-650 Flashing the firmware

[mitchelln]

Originally Posted by ShellShock

Yes, it drains the battery faster--AFAIK you can turn it off (only update on page turns).

Well, I'll let you all know how much it drops the battery life by. It's not a full page turn with parse and complete refresh, so we shall see. Plus it's only once a minute. I read pages a lot faster than that. So my page turns are going to outweigh the clock refresh rate whilst I'm reading.

The 650 goes to sleep after 10 minutes, so the risk of leaving it on to drain away the battery is moot as well.

[elcreative]

Does it still go to sleep after 10 minutes now?

Originally Posted by mitchelln

Well, I'll let you all know how much it drops the battery life by. It's not a full page turn with parse and complete refresh, so we shall see. Plus it's only once a minute. I read pages a lot faster than that. So my page turns are going to outweigh the clock refresh rate whilst I'm reading.

The 650 goes to sleep after 10 minutes, so the risk of leaving it on to drain away the battery is moot as well.

[porkupan]

Originally Posted by elcreative

There's a good reason for clock updating on page turns, it's called battery life... every clock update counts as a page turn so if done on page turn then no additional overhead on power usage, if every minute then each minute's update is an additional page turn as far as reader is concerned...

There should be no noticeable effect on the battery life. The 350/650 firmware uses hardware timers to wake up the JS, which do not appear to drain the battery in any significant way at all. In previous generations of readers the JS timers required the software to run for them to work. Not so in PRS-x50. The clock update doesn't count as a page turn. There is no flash access and only a very small portion of the screen is updated.

The hardware timer fires once a minute while the reader is not in sleep mode. Most people read more than a page per minute, so the clock updates attached to page turns will actually drain the battery faster than hardware timer-based clock.

[porkupan]

Originally Posted by elcreative

Does it still go to sleep after 10 minutes now?

If that's the setting you have in firmware (power saving mode), why not?

[elcreative]

That's why I asked... either the firmware applies or the clock setting could keep it awake...

Originally Posted by porkupan

If that's the setting you have in firmware (power saving mode), why not?

[ShellShock]

I'm using this command to extract my cramfs

sudo cramfsck -x dir image

When I'm done I rebuild it like this:

sudo mkcramfs dir newimage

If I compare the original and the new images I get slightly different output:

cramfsck -v image

d 0755       292  0:0   root
d 0755         0  0:0   root/Data
d 0755      1716  0:0   root/bin

cramfsck -v newimage

d 0700       292  1000:232   root
d 0700         0  1000:232   root/Data
d 0700      1716  1000:232   root/bin

So:
0700 etc instead of 0755.
1000:232 instead of 0:0.

I haven't been able to find any info on what these numbers mean, why they are different, and whether it matters.

Does anyone know?

Please ignore this if it is gibberish.

Thanks

[mitchelln]

Originally Posted by elcreative

That's why I asked... either the firmware applies or the clock setting could keep it awake...

It still goes to sleep fine

The 650 displays the clock in the bar when you press the info button when reading a book. So the code is there anyway. I suspect all the hack does is display the clock all the time. It won't be affecting how it works at the hardware or underlying code level.

[igorsk]

Originally Posted by ShellShock

So:
0700 etc instead of 0755.
1000:232 instead of 0:0.

I haven't been able to find any info on what these numbers mean, why they are different, and whether it matters.

Does anyone know?

Please ignore this if it is gibberish.

Thanks

Those are Unix permissions. 0700 means the directory will be readable only by the owner, not an ordinary user. It probably won't matter as on the Reader all processes run as root, but still, it's better to make permissions match.

[gregcd]

Something cool this firmware does is enable the clock on the option screen (in book or menu). So even if the main clock is turned off, the option clock is only ever one button press away.

[willyu34]

would someone be able to tell me what the partition size for the os on PRS650? I think there was a limit on the 650, just like the 600, so the font file can't be too large.

I think one of the reason I busted my reader might be going over that limit. This is less of a problem for western fonts but a huge problem for CJK because there are much much more characters in the set.

thanks!

[ShellShock]

Originally Posted by igorsk

Those are Unix permissions. 0700 means the directory will be readable only by the owner, not an ordinary user. It probably won't matter as on the Reader all processes run as root, but still, it's better to make permissions match.

Many thanks. What about the third column? The original had

0:0

for everything.

In my new image I have

1000:232

and variations. Is this a compression ratio? Does it matter?

[mitchelln]

Originally Posted by gregcd

Something cool this firmware does is enable the clock on the option screen (in book or menu). So even if the main clock is turned off, the option clock is only ever one button press away.

The 650 does this anyway now. It's a nice addition to the standard firmware. Sony seems to have really thought about the GUI this time around.

[igorsk]

Originally Posted by ShellShock

Many thanks. What about the third column? The original had

0:0

for everything.

In my new image I have

1000:232

and variations. Is this a compression ratio? Does it matter?

That's gid and uid of the file owner. 0 is root.

[porkupan]

Originally Posted by willyu34

would someone be able to tell me what the partition size for the os on PRS650? I think there was a limit on the 650, just like the 600, so the font file can't be too large.

I think one of the reason I busted my reader might be going over that limit. This is less of a problem for western fonts but a huge problem for CJK because there are much much more characters in the set.

The Rootfs partition is 32 MB, out of which about 14 MB is used. The flasher script actually checks that there is enough room the the partition to write your image, so that's probably not what killed your reader.

[ShellShock]

Originally Posted by igorsk

That's gid and uid of the file owner. 0 is root.

Thanks, I think I've got it worked out now.