OESF Portables Forum
Model Specific Forums => Sharp Zaurus => Zaurus - pdaXrom => Topic started by: Capn_Fish on August 10, 2006, 10:35:25 pm
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I am thinking of getting a C3200, but I want to be sure that pdaXrom works well and is stable on it first. I saw a thread on it here https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=19501 (https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=19501), but I would like to hear from people who have actually tried it. I would like to hear how well it runs, how stable it is, and how hard it was to get working.
Thanks in advance for your input!
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Well I just bought one only a week ago. I've only ever saw the z5500 and was so impressed by it that I had been wanting one for over 2 years now. So finally I got a good deal on a 3200 and got it.
So here goes. It's messy but thats me
I first installed Cacko. Which is great for what it is. But I wanted a more desktop feel. So I installed pdaxrom beta3. I don't have any problems with it. Seems to be quite stable.
It was simple to install. Just copied the 3 files to my SD card and ran through the NAND tool to flash the rom.
Booted right up to a shell login and startx. Did the touch test / inital setup. And right into the desktop.
I tried to use XFCE but had a lot of problems. And I didn't like matchbox that came with it so I used Rox and its great. Much easier to use and faster. Just wish that the minimized apps went to the task bar instead of a shortcut on the desktop. But better then having to click back / back to get to active apps and then open them.
I run xmms/mplayer with bvdd and videos run great and smooth / full screen.
I run snex9x and my games run great. Even mode 7 games which I had read were too slow to play. But they seem to run fine for me. Not full speed but still playable.
Rotating the display to tablet mode works great and is quite fast at switching over.
In tablet mode with ROX the background image becomes tiled even though its set to stretched. It wasn't like that in matchbox.
The LCD shortcuts on the side don't seem to work for me. But I never really cared about those type of keys even on my desktop keyboard.
The shortcuts on the keyboard. Not sure what their called but they're the little circle buttons. Only some of them work. So I'm sure its just a config issue. But again I don't care about these.
Package Manager doesn't seem to display the correct size for my ide3 partition. Only displays about 1.3 gigs free when I have over ~5 free.
I've read about suspend / restore problems but I havn't experienced it. It suspends just fine for me. But I don't have a CF or USB connected to it. Just my SD card which stays in. When my CF wifi card comes in we'll see
I've installed Firefox as I don't like the way Dilo (default web browser) renders a lot of pages. Firefox takes a while to load but is fairly good when using it.
xmame doesn't seem to run very well for me. But I havn't tried many games. In fact only 3 Too bad though cus I love Double Dragon (the first one only)
gaim and licq works great and are installed by default.
I found that the package manager isn't as good as it could be. Now I havn't read much up on this but here's my problem. The feed for beta3 doesn't have all the packages that other versions have. So I had to put multiple feeds in. Maybe I only need the beta1 feed. Not sure. Again havn't read much on it.
When you have multiple feeds you can get duplicated packages to install. And there is no section that indicates which feed each package is from. So your only choice is to remove the other feeds and install the package you need. But you may need to put the other feed back in to get dependancy feeds. Its not prety. And I read that mixing version feeds and packages could be problematic. But I havn't had this yet.
It would be nice to have a "cleaner" setup for the package manager. And some way to indicate which feed each package is from.
I find double clicking things a bit hard. Im sure its a config issue to adjust the double click speed.
I also want to be able to set the clock to "regular" time instead of 24 hour. There doesn't seem to be an option in the gui config for it. But maybe theres some config file you can modify. Also adjusting the color of it would be nice. Maybe it uses the desktop font colors I'm not sure but its solid black and no settings in the gui config app for it.
I find it quite slow to boot from a system halt. Which makes suspend your only real option for quick off / on capabilities. But this was the case with all of the roms I used.
xvkbd is a little slow to load up. This is the virtual keyboard.
Most of my problems are config issues I'm sure. But I'm still reading and buggin people for help. So soon it will be the way I want it.
I can't really think of anything else. But If you have any specific questions just ask. And if I think of anything else I'll let you know
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I am thinking of getting a C3200, but I want to be sure that pdaXrom works well and is stable on it first. I saw a thread on it here https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=19501 (https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=19501), but I would like to hear from people who have actually tried it. I would like to hear how well it runs, how stable it is, and how hard it was to get working.
Thanks in advance for your input!
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=138193\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
Similar experiences as SiduS'. Using beta3 with ROX desktop and additional KDE programs. After about 6 stable weeks there was a system crash and after that no resuming or booting to stable conditions was possible. So I had to do a NAND Restore to get stability back.
So it's a VERY good idea to have always an actual image as a NAND-backup on CF or SD card!
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I have another question. How well do USB devices work (keyboards, mice, and memory sticks specifically), and how hard are they to get to work?
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I've installed beta3 into C3200, but the suspend/resume problem causes me a lot of troubles, and I ended up restore it back to Sharp rom.
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I use pdaXrom on 3200 14 days and haven't problems with it. one-two little such as not defining model in some scripts and recognized zaurus as Borzoi. I very happy with new alsa drivers and possibility change volume on earphones and builtin speaker separatly. also I very happy with russian characters in pdf files, but I can't understand where I need configure TTF fonts for X server understanding it (only gtk apps works with ~/fonts-cache-1)...
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I've installed beta3 into C3200, but the suspend/resume problem causes me a lot of troubles, and I ended up restore it back to Sharp rom.
I've had a 3200 for a week, running pdaXrom beta3. I also had suspend/resume problems, but finally realised that many of these were caused by me misunderstanding the screen blanking. The screen blanks after a couple of minutes, but I thought it had suspended, so I tried to resume -- but actually I was suspending it.
I've been following the practice below for a few days, and haven't had any of my previous problems:
* always suspend "properly" from the system menu
* always check that system really is suspended (not simply screen blanked) by pressing Shift key
* always resume by pressing on/off button for 1 second (and then wait)
I still have nuisances from 3-5 screen refreshes when system resumes, and a "whited out" label for the icon with focus in each directory. These are annoying but I can live with them. (Maybe they've been fixed in beta4?)
Ian
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Is there any particular reason why you guys are using beta3 instead of beta4?
My 3200 is in the post
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Is there any particular reason why you guys are using beta3 instead of beta4?
My 3200 is in the post
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=138859\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
I couldnt' find the 3 files you need to flash the rom. So I just used Beta3.
I did have my first extended use of my Z and found some problems which I'll be posting if Beta 4 doesn't fix it.
Please point me to the correct files to install beta4 and I'll run that instead.
Thanks.
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pdaxrom gaved me problems. Mainly suspend resume. using sharprom with pdaxqtrom
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pdaxqtrom is a bit slow... so i just stick to sharp rom.
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you can always increase the clock speed to get pdaxqt a little snappier. I keep it onboard with cacko for when the shaprom apps aren't quite right for the job.
One reason to use beta3 is that beta4 is really unstable
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I also tried pdaXrom but also found that suspend would hard lock my SL-C3200. OpenBSD is the ROM I have chosen to use. I used cacko for awhile and the only thing I miss is the speed of cacko's opera browser.
you can always increase the clock speed to get pdaxqt a little snappier. I keep it onboard with cacko for when the shaprom apps aren't quite right for the job.
One reason to use beta3 is that beta4 is really unstable
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=138884\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
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i got a planex gw-cf11x card that i got with my 3200 but pdaxrom sees it but i can not get it to connect to my wireless network any help woul be apreciated because i like the look of pdaxrom but right now i use cacko 1.23 and the pdaxrom was beta 3
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i got a planex gw-cf11x card that i got with my 3200 but pdaxrom sees it but i can not get it to connect to my wireless network any help woul be apreciated because i like the look of pdaxrom but right now i use cacko 1.23 and the pdaxrom was beta 3
[div align=\"right\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div] (http://index.php?act=findpost&pid=140365\")
This is a known problem. Reason: Some firmware is missing on the card which must be uplaoded on each card insertion by the driver (as I understood it).
If you look at the output of dmesg, you will probably see some messages about a missing firmware.
There is a solution, see [a href=\"https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=15608&st=0&p=102085&#entry102085]here[/url].
But I have not tried it, but rather went back to my old D-Link DCF660W which works without such tweaks.
daniel
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I am running pdaxrom on my C3200 since I got the unit a week and a half ago - from my personal experience I can tell you that there is a steep learning curve to get everything working and setup as you like it (see my thread on this), but once you get it there it works very nicely.
Regarding the suspend/resume issues I at first thought it didn't work until I realised that when you resume, you should press the on button and WAIT, depending on how full the memory was when you suspended it can take a little while to resume - if I adhere to this, it does not fail me.
There are still various niggles - but none that make it unusable - the worst problem is that crashes are not unusual. I think once I have it all working and I don't need to keep fixing/changing things, it should be quite stable.
i got a planex gw-cf11x card that i got with my 3200 but pdaxrom sees it but i can not get it to connect to my wireless network any help woul be apreciated because i like the look of pdaxrom but right now i use cacko 1.23 and the pdaxrom was beta 3
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=140365\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
PLANEX GW-CF11X problem -
I did plenty of investigation on this, and the actual fix (posted somewhere) is to create a folder /etc/pcmcia/firmware and copy in the 2 firmware files I have attached to this post - copy it to the firmware folder and run
tar xvzf firmware.tar.gzthen just delete the original compressed file and next time you insert your wifi card it should pick it up and you can configure in the usual lan/wifi control program. Let me know if you need any more help but as you have the same setup as me it should be that simple.
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I am running pdaxrom on my C3200 since I got the unit a week and a half ago - from my personal experience I can tell you that there is a steep learning curve to get everything working and setup as you like it (see my thread on this), but once you get it there it works very nicely.
Regarding the suspend/resume issues I at first thought it didn't work until I realised that when you resume, you should press the on button and WAIT, depending on how full the memory was when you suspended it can take a little while to resume - if I adhere to this, it does not fail me.
There are still various niggles - but none that make it unusable - the worst problem is that crashes are not unusual. I think once I have it all working and I don't need to keep fixing/changing things, it should be quite stable.
Crashes?
I cannot remember one single real crash during my intensive experimentations (see http://www.daniel-hertrich.de/zaurus/zps_pdaxrom (http://www.daniel-hertrich.de/zaurus/zps_pdaxrom).
However, I have experienced situations which look like crashes and found out that they occur when
1. I have set date / time during X is running or
2. I have closed the lid of the Z for some time and reopened it (maybe also a time adjustment action here?)
The system still runs, but the GUI is not responsive anymore.
This is not too annoying at the moment, because I can avoid these situations.
Maybe I will have to find workarounds once I change my usage patterns and,k for example, need the Z to run during the lid is closed. We'll see.
Anyway, I have seen much more crashes and negative surprises with Sharp / Cacko ROM!
PLANEX GW-CF11X problem -
I did plenty of investigation on this, and the actual fix (posted somewhere) is to create a folder /etc/pcmcia/firmware and copy in the 2 firmware files I have attached to this post - copy it to the firmware folder and run
tar xvzf firmware.tar.gzthen just delete the original compressed file and next time you insert your wifi card it should pick it up and you can configure in the usual lan/wifi control program. Let me know if you need any more help but as you have the same setup as me it should be that simple.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=140388\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
Sounds great! I'll try the method you describe later today. Then I can finally reactivate my Planex card! :-)
Thanks a lot!
daniel
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Sounds great! I'll try the method you describe later today. Then I can finally reactivate my Planex card! :-)
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=140419\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
Have tried it now. It really works!
The firware loading commands exist already in the pcmcia scripts, so adding these two firmware files is the onlys thing necessary to make the card work.
Well, I had to reboot. Just adding the files and putting the card intot eh slot did not work. No idea why. Maybe the D-Link card I used before did sonthing wierd to the driver and it had to be reloaded.
I also looked into my other Z which has Cacko ROM and it indeed does the same (these two prism2_srec commands loading up the two firmware files).
So now it's not magic anymore why it works under Cacko but didn't work under pdaXrom so far :-)
Thanks a lot!
daniel
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How about USB stuff? Iwould like to be able to use my (powered) USB hard drive, USB mouse, and memory stick. Do these work out of the box or with a little tinkering?
Thanks.
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How about USB stuff? Iwould like to be able to use my (powered) USB hard drive, USB mouse, and memory stick. Do these work out of the box or with a little tinkering?
Thanks.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=143393\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
These kinds of devices should work out of the box.
daniel
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Now I want one even more!
Thanks for your input.
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I had my choice of c860... or C1000... and the USB on-the-go was the determining factor...
Late