If you wanna go SMD and you are looking for an alternative which is not as damn expensive as the L297 in SMD case, I’ll spare you the rest of the 20 awake nights.
It’s the A4989.
Under the following link you can buy one for around 4$ which is half of the price for an L297 in SMD:
http://www.digikey.ch/scripts/DKSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&itemSeq=116726484&uq=634771081247262960

As some of you maybe have learned, the last few weeks I was busy with my examina.
Beyond this, I sometimes relaxed my brain a little bit by tinkering around on my ASUS transformer prime.
As you certainly know, the ASUS transformer prime uses a TEGRA3 with the fuses burned into using an AES 128-Bit crypto engine, which forces one to use only bootloaders encrypted by ASUS.
My solution would have been to chainload U-Boot instead of a linux kernel and then using this U-Boot in order to allow multi boot and easier debugging and DeviceTree-Support and so on.
Unfortunately, this turns out to be quite unpracticable as the following mail dialog has destroyed my dreams of an easy solution:
http://www.mail-archive.com/u-boot@lists.denx.de/msg86389.html

And here the final destroying FAQ which bombs us back to square one:
http://www.denx.de/wiki/view/DULG/CanUBootBeConfiguredSuchThatItCanBeStartedInRAM

Maybe I should send the TF201 to China, ask them to unsolder the TEGRA3 and replace it by another non-fused TEGRA3…
Some black market guys will certainly be that kind and will do this… >.>

Hi folks
Everything works now

• WiFi
• USB
• All inputs
• 3D
• well… everything…

Next: Compiling Gentoo with KDE4 🙂

Maybe you think:
“Uh, ah! A tablet. ARM. Compiling Gentoo directly on this device?!
That takes ages!”

Nah. Goes like butter 🙂

4 cores, 2GHz, piece of cake.
That’s progress.
I’ve got the same CPU power in this little sweet net book as I have in my big tower build host in the cellar… >.>

EDIT:
And now you can also walk around naked in front of the TF201’s webcam, because now it’s running a GNU/Linux 😉

Ha!
Debian SID ARMHF with the unstable hardfp drivers from the nVidia-page (works well!) on an ASUS Transformer Prime.
It’s TWM with XTerm you’re seeing here right now.
Next issue: Getting USB working, getting the Synaptics driver working, compiling Gentoo for this device (maybe directly on it? I mean… 4 cores… each 2GHz 😀 )

Oh, I love it.
ChromeOS is Gentoo based, and as such it’s a GNU/Linux and as such in turn
it needs standard GNU/Linux kernel interfaces and as such I can use it
in combination with a full fletched Gentoo.
And because it’s a child of Google it gets support by the big bloat ware companies.
So ChromeOS forces the producers of hardware to provide usable driver code.

I don’t believe it how bitchy this hardware has been…
Now I can show you some stuff.
First of all ( among other things because after this evening of work I just need this ego push ) I can do this 🙂

~ # whoami 
root

But I can also show you the CPU info:

~ # cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor       : ARMv7 Processor rev 9 (v7l)
processor       : 0
BogoMIPS        : 1993.93

processor       : 1
BogoMIPS        : 1993.93

processor       : 2
BogoMIPS        : 1993.93

processor       : 3
BogoMIPS        : 1993.93

Features        : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant     : 0x2
CPU part        : 0xc09
CPU revision    : 9

Hardware        : cardhu
Revision        : 0000
Serial          : 0245000000994000

Next will be to compile for these features and do some “suit”-hunt one day…
Come on! System! Break down, then there are finally no laws anymore forbidding me to hunt suits with a shot gun >_>