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Sharp ROMs / Watapon ROM
« on: May 20, 2006, 05:36:08 pm »Quote
What are currently the big problems with OZ on the 5600?
What aspects of the Watapon ROM made it better?
I can take a quick look at the the major issues and port any patches in the Watapon buildroot over to the OE tree, but unfortunately I don't have the time to take it on as a project.
I used OZ 3.5.2 for a long time on my 5600. I was wary of 3.5.3 because of bugs people seemed to be encountering. (I also bricked my Z at one point while reinstalling OZ, but that was my fault. Nonetheless, it made me a bit gun-shy.) I installed OZ 3.5.4 with GPE, which looked absolutely fantastic (in 3.5.2 I was using Opie). However, as in 3.5.2, most of the internal flash was taken up by the ROM, which I didn't like. I wanted more room on the internal, in case I needed it for anything at all. Granted, most of what I was doing was linked on the SD card, but there were times when I wanted more than a few megabytes of memory. GPE seemed to run very slowly, and I was finding various bugs in different apps. Sorry I'm not giving enough specifics here - I'm just trying to give some general impressions.
Watapon was really a breath of fresh air for me. Everything seems to "just work" - I have very few problems with it. And it also takes up a relatively small amount of room on the internal flash - right now the PDA is filled with pretty much every app I need and then some, and I still have 17 mb left. Those are the two main reasons I like Watapon - usability and its small footprint.
For example, I had tremendous problems with Konqueror. Granted, it's amazing to have it working. And I'm a staunch supporter of free software - I run nothing but Linux on my home computers, and find it painful to have any proprietary stuff on them. I think the only thing I have that's nonfree right now is Java, which drives me insane since I'm trying to learn it. At some point I'd like to remove it entirely and just use something like gcj. But the browsing under 3.5.2 was just ridiculously difficult for me. Some pages would load fine. I'd say a third of the time it worked ok. But at other times, either the browser couldn't load a page in a readable way (text would run off the right side of the screen and it's just too annoying to read something by constantly moving the horizontal scrolling bar back and forth), or it would just crash. Even for something seemingly simple, like the documentation from www.python.org, loading from my own SD card, would crash.
On the other hand, Opera can compress most pages to fit in a column, and has far, far fewer crashes - I can probably count on one hand how many times it's crashed.
I like to think of Watapon as the Ubuntu of the Zaurus 5600 world, at least from a usability standpoint. This is not to point fingers as anyone - this has as much to do with me as with anyone else. I could have filled out bug reports, and I could have tried to do more to help with Openzaurus. But I simply don't have enough time. Nothing would make me happier than to have an entirely free Zaurus, but I need to be able to use it as well.
I wish the work on Openzaurus all the best - I think it is probably the most important work being done in the Zaurus software world by far. And I wish development on Watapon hadn't stopped - but the developer didn't have the time either. Hope what I wrote is helpful.