You will need a serial sync cable or serial sync cradle. The dual USB/Serial cradle that comes with the H3800 and H3900 will also work. You will need to use a terminal program such as minicom, kermit, or Hyperterminal.

If you use minicom or kermit, you will need to use an external ymodem program such as sb, which is available in the Linux lrzsz package.

  1. Hold down the joypad and push the reset button on the iPAQ. You will need to remove it from the cradle to access the reset button.

  2. Press the calendar button on the iPAQ. This is the leftmost action button, labelled "Serial Bootldr Console" on the screen.

  3. Make sure the terminal emulator is up and running, and is properly interacting with the bootloader. Proper interaction consists of being able to issue commands, and get responses (e.g. the help command should return the bootloader usage). Your terminal emulator must be set to 115200 8N1 serial configuration, no flow control, no hardware handshaking. Failing to use these settings will lead to trouble, so double and triple check all settings.

    If you cannot interact with the bootloader, make sure your terminal settings are correct, the iPAQ is properly connected to the host computer, and the iPAQ is actually on. If everything seems fine, try restarting the host terminal emulator and resetting the iPAQ again.

    Hyperterminal is particularly ill-behaved. Sometimes it uses 100% of the CPU without allowing any interaction with the iPAQ. In that case, you will need to use the task manager to terminate Hyperterminal before you can restart it.

  4. At the "boot>" prompt, issue the following command: load root

  5. Proceed to send or "upload" the jffs2 file (from the tarball that you downloaded earlier) with ymodem, using the terminal emulator. If you have not used ymodem before or you have any trouble with this command, please see handhelds-faq/getting-started.html#USING-XYZMODEM.

    Note that the bootldr now expects ymodem by default, not xmodem as in earlier versions. If you are unable to use ymodem for some reason, you can revert to xmodem operation with the command set ymodem 0

    You should see something like:

    
    boot> load root
    loading flash region root
    ready for YMODEM download..
    Erasing sector 00140000
    Erasing sector 00180000
    Erasing sector 001C0000
    Erasing sector 00200000
    .
    .
    .
    addr: 00360000 data: 781590DB
    addr: 00370000 data: 642637AE
    addr: 00380000 data: E0021985
    addr: 00390000 data: 15DA97EC
    Erasing sector 00FC0000
    writing flash..
    addr: 00100000 data: E0021985
    addr: 00110000 data: E3BAD617
    addr: 00120000 data: 0FA1F57B
    addr: 00130000 data: 9343AEEB
    .
    .
    .
    addr: 00600000 data: E0021985
    addr: 00610000 data: FFFFFFFF
    addr: 00620000 data: FFFFFFFF
    addr: 00630000 data: FFFFFFFF
    verifying ... formatting ... done.
    boot>
    
    	    
  6. At the "boot>" prompt, issue the following command: boot

    Linux should now start booting.

Continue to the post-install step.