X And Window Managers

[DReymann]

Hi there,

hope some people are still reading this section.

Per accident I discovered the section about Arch Linux on the zaurus. In the past I had been through nearly all available ROMs for the zaurus like, Cacko, pdaxrom and so on.
Because I really loved this little device (I have an CL3100) I fetched the zaurus from my box with long not used gadgets and I followed the instructions to install zalarm. So far had success.  The basic system is working. Thanks to all involved.

I really like to try X11 on the device. But I am stuck.

What I did:

I installed the following packages:
xorg-server
xorg-apps
xorg-init
xorg-xmodmap
xf86-video-fbdev
lxde

I added the user to the group video
and took the Xmodmap-File from this thread and modified .xinitrc like described above including the start of lxde.

When I type startx the screen seems to get in graphical mode for a short while, the machine is working on the harddisk for a little while, the screen stays black and then finally the command line comes back, saying XServer shut down normally. No errors in Xorg.0.log shown.

Any ideas what is missing or has to be changed?

Any hint would be great.

Thanks in advance

Detlev

[DReymann]

Hi there,

hope some people are still reading this section.

Per accident I discovered the section about Arch Linux on the zaurus. In the past I had been through nearly all available ROMs for the zaurus like, Cacko, pdaxrom and so on.
Because I really loved this little device (I have an CL3100) I fetched the zaurus from my box with long not used gadgets and I followed the instructions to install zalarm. So far had success.  The basic system is working. Thanks to all involved.

I really like to try X11 on the device. But I am stuck.

What I did:

I installed the following packages:
xorg-server
xorg-apps
xorg-init
xorg-xmodmap
xf86-video-fbdev
lxde

I added the user to the group video
and took the Xmodmap-File from this thread and modified .xinitrc like described above including the start of lxde.

When I type startx the screen seems to get in graphical mode for a short while, the machine is working on the harddisk for a little while, the screen stays black and then finally the command line comes back, saying XServer shut down normally. No errors in Xorg.0.log shown.

Any ideas what is missing or has to be changed?

Any hint would be great.

Thanks in advance

Detlev

Hi,

went through the whole installation. It was my fault - lxde was not fully installed.
I now have the LXDE-Desktop. Great!

Will keep on playing with the system ...

Detlev  

[Varti]

hope some people are still reading this section.

Hi DReymann and welcome back on OESF. Yes, there are still some of us following the Zaurus scene

I'm glad you have solved the issues with LXDE. I have never tried to run X11 on my Z, though it has been reported to be running slowly. If it will run slowly on your system too, you might give Void Linux a try, it reportedly runs faster and uses less memory than Arch:

https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showforum=205

Varti

[greguu]

Note: Void for Zaurus (voidz) currently has no X11 support. This is still WIP. Arch however runs LXDE, Fluxbox or i3wm.

 DReymann: What Arch rootfs did you use ? I am curious if the current rootfs from Feb 2018 still allows a seamless upgrade via pacman or if you experienced any issues. I have not updated it in a while.

[ArchiMark]

It's been over 2 years since my posts on the prior page.

However, as I recall, even though (as you can read) I got things working, the Zaurus was painfully slow with the setup as there is not enough RAM in the Zaurus for this to run effectively.

It's too bad, as I would have kept the Zaurus otherwise.

[greguu]

It's been over 2 years since my posts on the prior page.

However, as I recall, even though (as you can read) I got things working, the Zaurus was painfully slow with the setup as there is not enough RAM in the Zaurus for this to run effectively.

It's too bad, as I would have kept the Zaurus otherwise.

Yes, ArchiMark you are right. There is not enough free RAM on the Zaurus to run any major Xorg apps on Arch nowadays. However, if you trim Archs RAM usage down and run i3wm instead of LXDE, you may be able to get some stuff going. Chromium or Firefox are out of the question and so are most large Xorg applications, but some stuff may actually work ok, such as links2, netsurf, abiword, etc..

I hope to get voidz going using an optimized kdrive server (instead of full Xorg) and maybe also by resorting to use zram, in the near future.

The Zaurus is still very usable in console mode only - once you get tmux going and get familiar with the keyboard shortcuts of the various console applications.

[Varti]

Note: Void for Zaurus (voidz) currently has no X11 support. This is still WIP. Arch however runs LXDE, Fluxbox or i3wm.

Sorry, I forgot about this, thanks for clearing it out.

Varti