Any Netwalker Pc-z1 Users Still Out There?!? (nov 2016)

[Teamoth]

Just wondering if anyone's got an easy to install lightweight distro running on their Netwalker that they can share?

The stock Ubuntu 9.04 is really slow, to the extent that the keyboard and mouse won't work for periods of time (this is the same with an external keyboard and mouse). I have reset the stock Ubuntu 9.04 using the instructions on this page in the forum: https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=27365 (with some good help from Admin person Varti!), but it hasn't fixed the problem of how slow it is. If there was a way to install a lighter desktop environment I'm sure it would help. Although I'm really knowledgeable on Windows my Linux understanding sucks and most of the generic Ubuntu advice I have learned online does not seem to work with this weird Sharp-Flavoured-Arm version of Ubuntu 9.04.

One issue I have with it is that when it wakes from suspend it spends a while flashing up a plain white window in the middle of the screen with the words 'start-up now' and then loads up multiple instances of Firefox and tries to load Thunderbird (which I uninstalled as I don't need it). While this is all going on it is completely unusable and sometimes I have to just do a force shut-down by holding the power button down. So I've looked online at advice on this, but all the places I'm supposed to look inside Ubuntu do not contain these start up entries.

I bought the Netwalker in the hope of eventually being able to run a lightweight audio tracker program I like, as I find a portable device with a keyboard much better for this task than a normal touchscreen phone/tablet.

If you've seen Netwalker activity elsewhere online, or if you think I should be bothering another community, please let me know.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Teamoth

[Varti]

I've found out that someone has (at least) attempted to port ArchLinuxARM on the Netwalker:

https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=9663

You might want to ask him how far has the port progressed. A port like that is not for the faint-hearted, you might however ask for help to greguu here, he has done an ArchLinux ARM port for the Zaurus.

Varti

[Teamoth]

I've found out that someone has (at least) attempted to port ArchLinuxARM on the Netwalker:

https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=9663

You might want to ask him how far has the port progressed. A port like that is not for the faint-hearted, you might however ask for help to greguu here, he has done an ArchLinux ARM port for the Zaurus.

Varti

Hi Varti

I've improved things quite a bit by installing the LXDE desktop environment by running 'sudo apt-get install lxde'. There's information about it here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LXDE
Running LXDE seems to have made things a lot smoother and faster and I don't have the problem of it trying to load up Firefox and Thunderbird when I don't want it to and it's not dropping key strokes and mouse like it was. I've had to install a separate program to deal with wifi (I'm using Wicd Manager and it works well) as I couldn't find any wifi settings, and I have to launch gnome-power-manager manually each time I restart, but that's no biggy and I usually just suspend it rather than shut it down. There's probably some script I can write to make it run on start-up if I spend more time on that. But all in all, it's running much better now.

Work is still ongoing to see if Sunvox will work and so I'm bothering people on the Sunvox forum about that: http://www.warmplace.ru/forum/viewtopic.ph...;p=14564#p14564. Fingers crossed...

Cheers, Teamoth

[Varti]

Glad you got it working, I see now from older posts that some other Netwalker users has switched to LXDE with success, too. It seems also you are very close now to running sunvox. The error on the missing libsdl1.2 might be as the library package name on Meego is called "libsdl1.2", while under Ubuntu/Debian it is "libsdl1.2debian", so the installer can't find the library even if it's already installed. Try to force install sunvox with

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sudo apt-get -f install (name of the sunvox package)There might be however other unmet dependencies apart from libsdl, you might want to install them with

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sudo apt-get installand try running the sunvox binary again. Don't worry about the -force switch, you can anyway uninstall sunvox and try to install it again using a different solution.

Varti

[Teamoth]

Hi Varti
With a lot of help from Alex (who made Sunvox) I managed to get Sunvox running on the Netwalker, so I'm a happy man. There's still a lot of things about the Ubuntu OS that bug me, but with the LXDE desktop things are a lot better. In time maybe I'll actually figure out how to compile a better OS for it.
Thanks for all your help!
Teamoth

[Varti]

Glad you got it working at last

Varti