---
date: "2002-04-13T16:16:47Z"
title: He's Ipaqing Heat
---

<p>
I finally got tired of using my <a
href="http://athome.compaq.com/showroom/static/iPaq/3835.asp">iPAQ</a>
over a 115kb/s serial link, so I switched to <a
href="http://www.handhelds.org/z/wiki/How%20do%20I%20setup%20USB%20networking#sa1100_usbd">USB
networking</a>.  Wow.  <code>ipkg upgrade</code> (analagous to
<code>apt-get dist-upgrade</code> on a <a
href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> system) is a lot faster now;
roughly 120kB/s instead of 10kB/s over the serial link.  The theoretical
maximum throughput is about 1.37MB/s, but I think the limiting factor
here is the iPAQ CPU (a 206MHz StrongARM processor), since things get
kinda slow when I'm doing really heavy "disk" and network operations.
</p>

<p>
The other thing I did was get <a href="http://www.slac.com/~mpilone/projects/qtopiagnuboy.phtml">QtopiaGNUBoy</a>  working on the iPAQ.  The problem is as follows: the GNUBoy launcher is looking for the executable <code>qtopiagnuboy</code>, which is placed in <code>/opt/QtPalmtop/bin</code>.  For some idiotic reason, that path is not in <code>$PATH</code>.  You can work around that by setting <code>$PATH</code> properly from the console (ex: <code># PATH="$PATH:/opt/QtPalmtop/bin"; export PATH</code> for sh and bash users, or <code>setenv PATH "$PATH:/opt/QtPalmtop/bin"</code> for csh and tcsh users), but typing that out on the mini-keyboard sucks.  The correct fix is to modify <code>/etc/init.d/qpe</code> and add the following lines:
</p>

<pre>
PATH="$PATH:$QPEDIR/bin"
export PATH
</pre>

<p>
Oh yeah, for those of you who would rather do HTTP proxying instead of (or in addition too) IP masquerading, <code>/etc/init.d/qpe</code> is also a good place to set <code>http_proxy</code> and <code>HTTP_PROXY</code> (<a href="http://www.konqueror.org/embedded.html">Konqueror/Embedded</a> incorrectly uses the latter).
</p>

<p>
Anyway, GNUBoy works -- even for color games -- but it's really not
playable yet.  The requisite screenshots: <a
href="/screenshots/ipaq/monopoly.png">Monopoly</a> and <a
href="/screenshots/ipaq/zelda.png">Zelda</a>.  For the first time in my
life I have more USB devices than I can plug in at once: my UPS, my
Playstation controller adapter, and my iPAQ.  I'm planning on
getting another controller adapter so I can teach <a
href="http://www.snowman.net/">Snow-Man</a> why I was feared up and down
the west coast in Street Fighter II Turbo (as long as <a
href="http://www.snowman.net/~duerrj/">Joe</a> wasn't around), and all
across the country in Mario Kart (as long as <a
href="http://www.hellojoseph.com/">Sean</a> wasn't around).
</p>