Well it would seem mr Meanie has all but left the Z community for good so I gave up on waiting for a fixed-up pdaXii13, took the plunge and followed zdevils deceptively brief guide to installing Debian EABI- never did get wifi working under the latest ii13. It took me about 8 hours in the end to get most stuff set up I need. First impressions of EABI are good- it works much better than the last versions of OZ/Angstrom I tried on the c3xxx, it resumes much faster than pdaXii13 does but to me it doesn't seem quite as nippy as pdaXii13 (which I'd put down to the larger memory footprint of running full Debian) and the tarball linked in zdevils guide certainly requires a lot more configuring than pdaX if not as much as Titchy or Debian from scratch would. The best bit is knowing I can now apt-get over 23k packages or whatever its up to now!

I've read zdevil is working on a more refined tarball image with many more customisations and tweaks, so I eagerly await that but in the mean time I've encountered a few issues that some of you may have already solved:

1 - Can I get the matchbox-card-applet or something similar for the icewm panel? If not then just getting vfat(/fat) cf/sd cards to auto-mount would be good enough.

2 - Screen/power settings? At the moment when I shut the Zaurus lid, it does nothing ie the screen stays on and it doesn't suspend. I'd like it to go into suspend mode when I shut the screen if poss. Also, can I get an applet for icewm to blank the screen when I'm just using the Z for music playback , again similiar to the matchbox tool under pdaX?

3 - Under pdaXii13, I just had to uninstall the scim packages and that would cut the load time of gnumeric from about 30+ secs to around 6 seconds! scim doesn't seem to be installed presently but I was wondering if anyone could think of some packages I could remove or any other tweaks that may get me a gnumeric loading time that competes with the pdaX one?

4 - How do I overclock to 624Mhz (for when I'm compiling mainly)?

5- Not tried playing any vids yet, whats the best mplayer command for playing a 320x240 (avi) vid under Debian EABI?

Thanks to zdevil for the guide and thanks to all those who can help my improve my Z/Deb experience!

"Debian - the great work of the digital age"

Just a quick update after more messing with Debian:

My first question has mostly been solved now by a combination of adding entries for /dev/hdc1 and /dev/mmcblk0p1 to /etc/fstab and rox-filer's support for (un)mounting drives but I've tried mplayer with a few avi files now and haven't even been able to get a picture, never mind a smooth one. I've tried pxa, x11 and fbdev values for mplayers -vo option but none worked for me.

For video performance and mplayer issues, you can check out this thread: http://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=25456

Close-lid & backlight off: It seems to be a bug. I am trying to fix it now by making a new script to turn on/off backlight on lid open/close events. That should be easy to fix.

Update:

Fixed. I find that /usr/bin/bl (called by the closing/opening/twisting screen events) is defunct. So I improve the setfl script as a replacement and execute it in lid closing/opening event.
Now closing the lid will turn off the screen backlight. Opening it will turn it on again (resuming the backlight value before off).
Also I can set the backlight higher, lower, off, on (resuming the value before off) and maximal value thru command line/key binding.

Perhaps I should split things further into three: new desktop environment, icewm enhancement, and general fixes (backlight, mouse right click, "yelp" fix, libdirectfb and libts mods)?

New things keep poping up when working towards the end ...

Hi zdevil!

Great news about you getting power/screen ops working! How can I get this set up properly?

Have you updated your Debian image since I last posted here? I think it would be cool to include a pre-configured rox/icewm desktop, complete with auto-mounting of disks, much like pdaXii13- but it sounds like you've added quite a lot to what I installed the other week so maybe this is already in?

Hi ZDevil,

Thanks for all the help. I'm up and running now. What packages do you recomment to install?
I'm going to try lxde,

One issue, after doing the post install, I have no xfbdev package, so I cannot do a startx. How can I install this. I tried

apt-get install xserver-xfbdev

but the package is not found. Thanks.

You can download the repackaged version of xserver-xfbdev from angstrom.
http://yonggun.tistory.com/54

Hi the following package is corrupt : xserver-kdrive-fbdev