microSD data corruption

In trying to get an FSO-daily on my microSD card, I discovered some microSD corruption: I copied a 35MB file over USB via scp straight to the micro SD card... and it was bogus. So I copied it instead to /tmp, which is on a ramdisk - and it worked fine. So to verify, I then tried to copy the file from /tmp to the micro SD card via 'cp'... and it was again bogus. So there's some corruption hiding there. This is with qtopia 4.3.2 rootfs and kernel.

A month of FreeRunning

So I ran Qtopia until I couldn't stand not being able to suspend it, at which point I decided to try the 2008.8 update. I put it on my 'unstable' partition (the microSD card) and it seemed to work okay. I ran with it for a while, always switching back to the (battery-eating) qtopia when I needed more stability.

Then I decided to do an opkg update/upgrade on the 2008.08 and... it merrily assumed that it was the main distro and reflashed the NAND kernel as well as (correctly) upgrading the uImage.bin in the FAT partition on the microSD card. *sigh* At that point I didn't have time to deal with it and 2008.08 seemed fine, so decided to see how it would go.

...and the answer was: unstably. It was nowhere near stable enough for daily use. So as of a couple days ago, I'm back on qtopia (4.3.2) as my main stable feed with FSO(m2+testing feed) as my 'unstable' distro. I did have to tweak the 'Speaker Playback Volume' in /usr/share/openmoko/scenarios/gsmhandset.state up to 127 (from the default of 100) to be able to hear the other end a bit better. Oh, and happily, qtopia now suspends correctly, so battery life is greatly enhanced to say the least!

Qtopia killed my battery!

By the way, if you have a FreeRunner and are running the Qtopia distro, you might be tempted to try and extend your battery life by enabling suspend... don't. It doesn't work correctly and far from saving your battery it will drain it so dead that sitting on the moko charger all night won't charge it.

Which makes me really glad I bought an external battery charger from some random cellphone supply shop I found on the 'net.