Lixus - Running linux on a Canon Digital Ixus - Not possible? Yes, it is.
All began nearly one year ago - I was trying to develop a USB driver for a program that should be using the Canon Digital Ixus V2 (a digital photo camera) as an input device. Soon I spotted a bug in the IXUS USB protocol, that made my camera not working anymore at all. After some mail exchange with Canon I was told the hard memory would probably be overwritten with garbage by me. Woohoo - I thought, restoring the default memory set after instructions from Canon, overwriting the first bytes again - but not with garbage, but with some bytes that should be instructions to the IXUS' CPU. After months of research I had written an assembler program that could print a sentence on the IXUS' display. After that the idea of installing a rewritten Linux kernel on it came up. Two friends of mine, who also own the Ixus camera, were ready to help me (and help they did :-)). We stripped the kernel sources from nearly all drivers, and successfullly compiled it after various tries (with a modified linker). Sadly, it took a long time to have the kernel and other things (like bash) actually run on the IXUS. But it worked. See the gallery to have some impressions. Detailed information will follow.
WARNING: I RECOMMEND YOU NOT TO TRY THESE PROGRAMS WITH YOUR IXUS, UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND KNOW HOW TO RESTORE THE DEFAULT PROGRAM - VERY LIKELY THAT YOUR IXUS WON'T WORK AFTER RUNNING THEM!!!
gcc-lixus - modified gcc
Gallery - pictures of running Linux on IXUS
For usage and compilation, see the README in the above programs. Sorry, I
didn't had time yet to write a usefull documentation on the IXUS protocol or
the IXUS CPU instructions. Will come. Maybe :-)
/!\ Warning: Sorry, do not take the "Lixus" project seriously :). It is just supposed to be a joke page.
If you want to contact me nevertheless, you can do that at lixus@uberhax0r.de.