Zaurus Port Of Treeline, Out the door Options

[zenyatta]

Hi all,

I started working on a Zaurus port of the fine TreeLine outliner early last year but later got distracted. I haven't touched it in about 7 months now and it isn't really ready for a release but I do use it daily and absolutely can't do without it, despite the bugs. As I have trouble finding the time to finish it, I have decided to release it in its crude present state. Either someone will pick it up or enough users will find it promising enough to nag me into activity Or maybe it won't interest anyone, which is fine. In any case, it is there, on my homepage.

Cheers,
z.

[fpp]

Episode 2 - Installation

Here, early on, is where most users of the original Sharp ROMs, and compatible derivatives (like the excellent Cacko ROMs), will encounter a problem.

Zenyatta built his treeline_0.8.1_arm.ipk in an OpenZaurus environment, which is almost, but not quite, totally unlike Sharp's. In particular, they both call their packages IPKs but have different ideas of what should be inside.

Sharp's IPKs are really renamed .tgz files (TAR archives compressed with gzip).
OZ compresses with the 'ar' program instead of gzip, so Sharp's installer refuses to handle those packages. Note: mickeyl's arm-python packages pose the same vexing problem to non-OZ users.

So what to do ?

One way is to upgrade your original package manager : somewhere in the ZUG feed you will find a replacement to ipkg (both graphical and command-line) that supposedly handles both formats equally well (I don't doubt it, but I haven't tried).

Another quick-n-dirty way, if you're not afraid of the Linux shell and the command-line, is to open the console, and uncompress your treeline_0.8.1_arm.ipk with 'ar', then untar the resulting file. This will yield three files, one - the biggest - called data.tgz. If you gunzip/untar this one, you get a directory tree starting with 'opt' and containing all the needed files for Treeline, so it's just a matter of copying this to / (as root), and it should work.

Note 1 : using this method I do get a TreeLine icon in the Apps tab after rebooting Qtopia, but it doesn't work. For now I just open the console and run 'treelinelauncher'.

Note 2 : when doing this you may see that the program complains at startup that something is amiss with Unicode, and please RTFM. The README says to copy the sitecustomize.py file from the source directory to the site-packages directory in your Python installation. When you do this, the message goes away. But the icon still doesn't work

In the screenshot below you also see error messages (tracebacks in python) printed when you select some menu items that don't work on the Z. Contrary to VB or othe languages, the app just trudges on regardless :-)

 scrn004.jpg ( 160.94K ) Number of downloads: 193