I'm now running Arch on my C3000!
kexecboot was simple to install but I had a bit of trouble installing the Arch tarball. I was trying to untar it from the D+B console and I also tried doing it from the pdaXii13 installer console. Both of these use busybox so there's little difference but I think the pdaXii13 busybox is a bit newer than the D+B one. It turns out you can't use busybox tar or even GNU tar to uncompress ArchARM (or ALARM as they prefer to call it), you have to use bsd tar. If you already have a Linux or BSD installed then you should be able to install and use BSD tar but I didn't so instead I uncompressed the Arch latest tar.gz on my laptop then re-tarr'ed it with GNU tar. I still had problems when I gzipped my new tarball for some reason so I had to leave it uncompressed for busybox tar to be happy.
I haven't been able to properly use it yet because, as warned, the keymap isn't set up properly yet although it is working well enough for me to be able to log in. I can't type forward slash currently so real use is a no-go unless I plug in a USB keyboard, maybe.
Suspend isn't working properly but it works better than under OpenBSD on the C3000. When I hit suspend, apm acknowedges the suspend request and the screen goes blank for a couple of seconds before turning back on. This seems closer to the expected behaviour than the grey screen I get under OBSD.
The other oddity is that my orange power LED is blinking twice every second or so when I have AC connected. None of the other distros I've tried do this. Does your C3100 do that daalnroti?
I love it how ALARM only uses 10MB RAM OOTB!
Thanks for bringing Arch to the Z daalnroti - I think this is going to be great once I've got the keyboard and wifi working!
Hi Danboid,
great to hear you had success with the ALAM tar ball. I used my debian port to install arch on the same drive (dual boot).
KEYMAP:
if you can not get a forwards slash, use TAB in the command line after typing a directory name
then create a new folder /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/zaurus
cd /usr/share/kbd/keymaps
mkdir zaurus
then copy the attached file borzoi.map.gz into that folder, then edit you /etc/vconsole.conf
(install terminus font via pacman and also add the FONT part for better console font reading)
KEYMAP=borzoi
FONT=ter-v14n
reboot. Hopefully this will get your keymap fixed.
Note : This is a custom keymap I have created from a pdaxrom one. Look into the borzoi.map.gz file to see what it does.
SUSPEND:
I have not played with it. I suggest to leave this until you got a proper running system and then investigate from there.
POWER LED:
Back then I patched the kernel code to have the orange light show the "cpu heartbeat" instead of charging status. This was mainly for debugging purpose.
If it stops blinking, your Z kernel hangs. This never happened with kernel 3.11.3, as it is stable. I can remove that patch if you like, but there
was an issue with off-line charging...??
WIFI :
The kernel is a custom build used for debugging and testing and has only DLINK and and ASUS USB driver installed for WiFi.
As simple recompile can add any other driver you need. What WiFi card do you have ?
MEMORY:
to reduce memory usage, install dropbear instead of ssh.
with systemd, limit the ttys you open to maybe 4 in the console to save memory.
switching tty with the new keymap (FN - RIGHT or LEFT)
BORZOI:
Myself I have only a C3100 (borzoi) but I included in the kernel support for the C3x00 series. It should work!
KERNEL:
I might attempt to get a 4.x series kernel compiled, but at this stage I am not too worried as there will be no improvements, probably more issues.
If there is an issue with ALARM and the current 3.11.3 kernel, I will update.
Cheers!