OESF Portables Forum
Model Specific Forums => Sharp Zaurus => Zaurus - pdaXrom => Topic started by: Laze on October 07, 2004, 12:00:56 pm
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We have just released the latest RC, RC5 – it’s entirely new and has Vector Floating Point. Please download, test and report back.
Please note that all other feeds than the RC5 feed is broken due to the new VFP.
Lots of bugfixes and new stuff - like Quake running in 15 FPS ;-)
Get it at www.pdaXrom.org
Bugs fixed:
screen rotation not working when...
Term launchers differ in menu/taskbar
/dev/tun is missing in pdaXrom distribution
SSH Idle Timeout to early
No apparent reason for inetd running
iptables-kernel modules
SD doesn't mount(does mount on boot)
LAN/Wifi applet oddities
XMMS adjust equalizer doesn't work/quits
Pen drag mode gets cancelled / window resize...
Wallpaper filenames cannot contain spaces
Look & Feel minor typo
Re-suspend in 5 secs
Background change wipes taskbar icons
PS. I know its getting confusing with new and old ROMs/SDKs etc. as soon we get a bit further with development - the site will be cleaned up and get a new bug reporting system (probally bugzilla), forum and probally a general facelift.
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That's GOOD news
.. On my way to compile
thanks alot,
jabbath
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jabbath - did you receive the developer information?
Please notice that all the current IPKs need recompiling in order to work and you need the latest SDKs - we apologize for the problems.
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but I noticed xmms isn't in the feed
ups, feed not fully uploaded.. we will add all packages soon as laze will back online :-)
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Noticed it stopped at files begining with S.
Thought it was still loading.
Look forward to trying this one.
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May I ask exactly what "Vector Floating Point" means?
Did you backport the gcc3.4 stuff into 3.3.2?
I take it you don't mean vector as in an array of floats.
Not to sound ungrateful, just want to understand :-)
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My first impression is a great speed improvement. Everything seems alot snappier. Wonder how this will influence on batt. life...
Is it Vector FP or perhaps Virtual FP?
Thank you guys - this is great!
Peter
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Sorry for messing up the feed - its updating now (including XMMS).
I haven't got the time to make the ipk upload ready yet..
For running Quake i recommend no X windows - just plain shell.
export SDL_NOMOUSE=1
./quake -nocdaudio -nojoy -nomouse -nolan -noautostretch -winsize 320 240You could also play with -particles 100 and the -nosound should also give you some extra fps.
Making an autoexec.cfg file in the id1 directory with following will also improve performance:
cl_bob "0"
cl_bobup "0"
d_mipcap "1"
d_mipscale "1"
r_waterwarp "0"
r_maxparticles "0"
crosshair "1"
fov "70"
loadas8bit "1"
m_filter "1"
r_drawviewmodel "0"
r_maxedges "1000"
r_maxsurfs "400"
viewsize "90.000000"All the above should give you nice FPS and if you overclock a little you can get above 20 fps :-)
oohhh to benchmark enter the console(Options->Console) and type timedemo demo1.dem - and press ES/Cancel right after - then let it run and you will get FPS.
ooohhh - it works execellent with network games two - has just beaten the crap out of my girlfriend in multiplayer :-)
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Thanks for softfloat. It really is a great improvement. The trouble of getting it all broken will pay itself triple in the future.
And some heavy-duty bug tracking like Bugzilla would be a nice choice too, great you're considering it.
Btw people, sorry that I failed to get to scummvm and dosbox, other pressing stuff gives not much spare time :( But now it seems to be a perfect time to actually get to them and compile with softfloat =)
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Sorry for messing up the feed - its updating now (including XMMS)
For the impatient: XMMS is part of the rc5 rom
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Friends,
I would like very much if someone with knowledge can explain me what does vector floating point and virtual floating point means. I can see that all ipk needed recompilation, I assume in order to use this new feature, which I also asume that ends up into faster execution. But maybe I am wrong Anyway, I want to know someone ?
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WOW OMG quake is good.
soooooo good
Thank you.
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The RC5 feed won't work for me with the package app. Perhaps it's just that the file "packages" needs to be renamed "Packages"?
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Yeah, that would fix it. For now I just edited /usr/bin/ipkg and changed it to accept both.
[Update]
A link to my copy is as follows: -
http://dev.worldguard.com.au/ipkg (http://dev.worldguard.com.au/ipkg)
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Hope, quake will work with my usb mouse through gpm.
Will a player-friendly (without screen poweron by any keypress) screen blanking applet come? I've written a simple one, but it only brings screen down after keypress if it was already off before.
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Fixed Packages filename sorry :-) It wen't a little bit fast..
The "screen blanking" applet is in progress...
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Trying to format my sdcard to ext2 but I have run into a few problems first I noticed that the sdcard is no longer under /dev/mmcda1 it is under /dev/mmcd/disc0/part1
well I got the sdcard to umount but I can not get fdisk to read it at all anyone have any Ideas of what to do?
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Friends,
I would like very much if someone with knowledge can explain me what does vector floating point and virtual floating point means.
As usual, Google is your friend. Try this (http://lists.arm.linux.org.uk/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2003-December/018688.html) for starters.
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The ARM manual (http://www.arm.com/pdfs/DUI0067D_ADS1_2_CompLib.pdf) has a section on floating point support. It appears that some ARM processors do have hardware floating point instruction support, though not the Zaurus processors. Older floating point emulation treated floating point instructions as unsupported operations which generated an exception which was then handled one way or another in software. The vector floating point support provides a software floating point library which can be specified as a compile option. Once programs are recompiled with the option, the software floating point routines are called directly, avoiding the exception process which was presumably a lot slower. I'm no expert, but I think that's what's going on.
Thanks to the pdaXrom folks for an enhancement most of us probably didn't know to ask for.
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Can we please try and keep this thread from being hundreds of pages long with several different bugs/issues in the same thread?
If someone finds a bug/issue, please create a new thread with the issue (obviously indicate rc5, etc.).
This will make the forums/threads easier to search down the road.
thanks!
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I totally agree with offroadgeek - as you might have noticed i have joined the admin team.
But please try to report bugs in our bugsystem (yes i know its not perfect) - and make new threads if you discover new stuff or have specific new problems, etc.
Bug please consider bug reports carefully and test thoroughly before reporting them - make sure that the are real bugs and not just feature request like "i would like to see Half Life 2 etc."
Ps. We are working on getting Quake 2 running (when we get bored with regular bughunting)...
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I just want to say thanks to the PDAXROM team. You guys have been doing a great job of putting up with us whiny users and giving us an OS which is starting to reach the potential of the zaurus's excellent hardware.
Even though we've still got a ways to go, you've taken us a long long way, and I appreciate it.
Also, thanks to the ZUG for hosting these forums!
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The bluetooth script in pcmcia seems to be lacking the hciconfig hci0 down; sleep 1 bits needed to stop certain bluetooth cards from locking up (Bluemonkey etc.)
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This new ROM is _a_w_e_s_o_m_e_!
I made a simple but correct test with sin,cos,tan functions in it. I tried it with 100.000 cycles in RC3, the Zaurus completed it in 5,6 sec. Now I recompiled this test program under RC5, but with 100 times more cycles (10.000.000) in it. And it was completed after 23.051 secs!
This means the new rom floating point part is about 25 times faster than it was before!
Woohoo!
Thank you for your good work, pdaXrom team! I can't stop clicking on the banners because of my happiness!
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Zumi thanx for benchmarking :-) Btw. the best banner are the non-Zaurus, Windows software - like the ones under bug reporting, about us etc. ;-)
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Just thought you would like to know, built your Quake version for SDL on Qtopia and got a whopping.... 3.5fps..... definitely PDAXROM is the way to go if you want Quake.
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Well done lads. RC5 is the first ever pdaxrom that i've ran, and i'm not going back! I love having ABIWORD and GNUMERIC... and they seem really fast.
There is a slight shiver on the screen as it's being redrawn on the terminals, depending on the angle and what ambient light there is... Is that normal, but in any case it's not a problem!
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ho !! how right is omega !!!
Abiword IS REEEEEEEALY fast in this version !!! In previous versions, large files were very long to appear, and when you typed a long text you had to wait for abiword to finish for quite a long time..not anymore !!!
Same remark about xpdf ! At last i can read large docs without waiting for 20 seconds or so !
Everything is faster now, and batt life did not change, this is a miracle.
You know what ? French governement sells laptops for 1 euro a day for students... but forget about that : my zaurus is a wonderfull textprocessing tool, a beatifull mp3 player, a super game machine, and i can play around with it for MUCH more than the 3 or 4 ridiculous hours a laptop can stay on batt !
RC5 is definitely the best rom ever !!!!!!
Keep going on, guys, your job is ssooooooo good !!!
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Now WHY couldn't you have released this RC when I still had my C760 huh Laze? tut tut tut
Glad to hear that pdaXrom is becoming increasingly popular. Keep up the good work.
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stuff linked to here: http://www.pdaxrom.org/index.php?showid=40&menuid=11 (http://www.pdaxrom.org/index.php?showid=40&menuid=11)
mirrored here: http://zaurus.spy.org/feeds/cacko/pdaXrom/1.1.0/rc5/ (http://zaurus.spy.org/feeds/cacko/pdaXrom/1.1.0/rc5/)
Laze -- feel free to put stuff on spy...
The feed http://mirror1.pdaxrom.org/rc5/feed/ (http://mirror1.pdaxrom.org/rc5/feed/)
is also here: http://zaurus.spy.org/feeds/cacko/pdaXrom/1.1.0/rc5/feed/ (http://zaurus.spy.org/feeds/cacko/pdaXrom/1.1.0/rc5/feed/)
(also unstable) ..
copied as of the date of this post 12/OCT/2004 -- 1pm EST
Scott
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Thanx scott - hadn't had the time to do it myself yet..
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Well done lads. RC5 is the first ever pdaxrom that i've ran, and i'm not going back! I love having ABIWORD and GNUMERIC... and they seem really fast.
There is a slight shiver on the screen as it's being redrawn on the terminals, depending on the angle and what ambient light there is... Is that normal, but in any case it's not a problem!
I noticed that Abiword and Gnumeric load faster. I did create a file in Gnumeric on my desktop and tried opening the file on my Z. It took forever, and then crashed.
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i'd like to point out also the lack of af_socket module and rest in kernel needed if someone needs to work with libcap and the rest like the snort nmap. (trying to compile libcap on-board showed that these indeed are missing).
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Where can I find sdcard-0.0.1.tar.bz2 ?
Trying to build with the builder, but can't find this one, it's not in http://mirror1.pdaxrom.org/source/src/ (http://mirror1.pdaxrom.org/source/src/)
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Well done lads. RC5 is the first ever pdaxrom that i've ran, and i'm not going back! I love having ABIWORD and GNUMERIC... and they seem really fast.
There is a slight shiver on the screen as it's being redrawn on the terminals, depending on the angle and what ambient light there is... Is that normal, but in any case it's not a problem!
Damn that shiver. It's why I moved from pdaX to Cacko. pdaX has the "shiver"; Cacko (and others) do not. It's frustrating because I otherwise would love to use pdaX. And I realize not everyone sees it, but I think that is partially an eyesight issue, and perhaps it just doesn't happen on all Zs. I definitely see it - drives me nuts. And I know a few others have reported it as well.
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I unpinned the subject - its kinda old news... :-)
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but if the shiver was fixed, that would be awesome new news :-)
Scott
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What can this shiver thing be caused by? Could it be some beating between the scanning of the display and the frequency at which the backlight LEDs are switched on and off (with a varying duty cycle to change the brightness)? How much of this is under software control?
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Hi ...
What about this flickering / shiffering? I use my c860 with Kathrin RC5 and I saw this flickering when I switch my Z from suspend / off to on with keyboard or on/off key ... its only very hard in the first second or two after this it could only be seen not very hard ...
Martin