Messages

1

Ubuntu / Compiling For Zubuntu

« on: March 10, 2009, 05:10:00 am »

Compilation works albeit slowly on the Zaurus. I have compiled emacs (latest cvs version) - not what I would call a trivial application - in about 2-3 hours from scratch. As Cortez says make sure you have a swap partition or even just a swapfile. Overclocking is currently not compiled into the version of the kernel - but heres hoping someone gets it working again.

Thanks for advice. Well, I have to check how did I install the Zaurus when I come home ;-). Sorry for a dumb question: in the case there's no swap partition, how can I install a swap file?

2

Ubuntu / Compiling For Zubuntu

« on: March 09, 2009, 04:26:17 am »

Always make sure you have a swap partition. You could also try to use distcc, but I prefer using Qemu for doing "native" compilation.

Thanks a lot. The Qemu option is seems promising.

And thanks for Zubuntu, cortez. This is definitely one of the best pieces I could play with in the last years. Any news from the Ubuntu people?

3

Ubuntu / Compiling For Zubuntu

« on: March 06, 2009, 04:58:54 am »

Hello,
first of all, thanks a lot for the great Zubuntu distro. What I need just works™ ;-).

This is the first time I am trying to compile something on my Zaurus, which I actually acquired some time ago mainly in order to port my own software to ARM based platform and to play with it. I have a rather small project written in C++ heavily using Boost libraries and packaged with autotools chain. No problem under Zubuntu, configure worked perfectly, even a devel distro build (after I downloaded and compiled libtool2 which went as a breeze - well, pure C). Now the poor gadget is fighting with my code already since 3 hours and still it did not finish crunching the first(!) cpp file. When I check it with g++ -E ..., I can see that the piece after expanding all the macros has 60k+ lines in C++. Well, there are bigger still to come...

What can I do to speed up the compilation process? How do you guys compile large C++ codebases?  Overclocking doesn't seem to be an option, so with this speed of progress, if I am lucky, I will probably wait about a week until my smallish program (it has about 5k physical source lines of code) compiles and links.

Is there perhaps some quick and dirty manual for cross-compiling for ARM (in particular Zubuntu 1.0)?

Thanks for any advice,

Peter.

4

Ubuntu / Zubuntu 1.0...

« on: October 31, 2008, 10:35:37 am »

Keep working! I am really looking forward to see you work on my Akita. In the meantime I will click on your adverts :-D.

5

Ubuntu / Ubuntu Mid Edition

« on: June 27, 2008, 07:30:08 am »

Ok, I'm going to let the cat out of the bag,

Remember a few months back, I put pdaXrom on hold pending "a new direction"... this was it

Respect. This is a very good news. So I wish all the best and good luck with the project.
And of course you just got a beta-tester ;-).

Best,

Peter.

6

Ubuntu / Ubuntu Mid Edition

« on: June 26, 2008, 01:56:03 am »

Hello Cortez,
will we see this: http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS4429818312.html running on Zaurus? As I understand it, the core technology is done. What is left to do so that we can see some of those nice screenshots in real? I am definitely interested in that GUI they have. It seems to be the step in the right direction as I think the GUI is the essence of PDA...

Thanks for an update,

Peter.

7

Ubuntu / The Birth Of Zubuntu

« on: May 25, 2008, 07:22:14 am »

Hey cortez! very interesting indeed ;-).

I tried to check your website but did not find more details about the HW support the distro provides. Could you please say what is the status of the HW support? I mean does WiFi work? I see you had issues with sound, but nly because a driver was not installed. I am very interested to try to play with your work and see where it goes. What are the limits you see now?

Thanks for an update,

Peter.

8

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Pdaxii13v2: First Collection Of Experiences

« on: November 29, 2007, 06:20:30 pm »

ROX
After X restart it replaces my background image. Obviously more than a file manager comes with it. But how can I put it into a plain file manager mode and keep the standard openbox desktop? I'll have to work on this in the close future.

BUG: After first attemtp to launch rox-filer it opened however without few icons. It displayed some question marks instead. When started from command line, it spit out this:
** (ROX-Filer:1760): WARNING **: Couldn't recognize the image file format for file ...
I googled around and found the problem described here. However running "$ gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders > /etc/gtk-2.0/gdk-pixbuf.loaders" did not help!!! Later I found the problem was with how libpng is installed. Some applications (apart from Rox) do not find the libpng library. Solution was to simply provide a correct symbolic link /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 to the correct .so file. This seems to be a distribution issue.

I had to once again solve this issue and I remember several peopole asking abnout it. So this is how it is to be solved on the pdaXiiv2:

- uninstall whatever libpng version you have installed
- install libpng with the highest version number (currently 2.1.12)
- execute gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders > /etc/gtk-2.0/gdk-pixbuf.loaders

The command should finish withot an error. And there you go then...

9

Debian / A Clean, Fresh, Configured Eabi Rootfs Tarball

« on: November 09, 2007, 10:12:59 am »

Give it a try. It would be nice to play a bit with yet another distro until I finally settle down on a final decision .

10

General Discussion / Olpc Sugar On Z?

« on: November 09, 2007, 04:24:28 am »

On my search for improvements of GUI experience on Zaurus, I recently got interested in Sugar interface of OLPC: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar. It's build around OpenHand matchbox we know from Angstrom, or pdaXrom. I would like to hear if anybody tried to play with it extensively. As far as the user interface is concerned, in the end what is good for kids should be good for adults as well ;-). And an intuitive and practical interface is what a small PDA/laptop like device definitely needs. Would it be difficult to compile it for Z?

11

C1000/3x00 General discussions / Best Rom For Me

« on: November 09, 2007, 03:16:42 am »

This question seems to arise all the time. I am in your situation as well. You can check my rants from few weeks ago here and here.

In the meantime I went through pdaXiiv13v2, pdaXrom r198, Sharp ROM and Angstrom. Without any prejudice and with all the honor distro developers deserve, my brief judgements from a C1000 user's perspective:

pdaXrom r198
+ Promissing and judged by Meanie's work on old versions I would bet on this one for the future.
- some HW problems still (sound) and not the best UI support (obviously Meanie has a lot to do and there don't seem to be enough dedicated people to work on it) and what I do mind is the flashing - needs U-boot emergency system (why?) - that makes it difficult to install and especially to remove! but of course not impossible... I am just always struggling with it...

pdaXii13v2
+ works, fairly good GUI support and with a bit of Linux knowledge you get most stuff working quickly (e.g. WiFi)
- obsolete kernel (I myself don't care that much), not optimized for C1000 (by default consumes quite a bit of NAND so you have to be carefull with installing stuff)

Angstrom
+ has a drive towards a very mature software product, seems to have a good developer's ecosystem, seems to follow a rigorous development process and the scene seems to be highly organized, as far as HW is concerned, WiFi worked the best with this distro (after some tweaking) - almost Plug-and-play.
- support (over-sensitive, unhelpful and arrogant developer(s), no good feedback when problems occur - check the Angstrom bugzilla - a lot of stuff and users are left in the dark - DISCLAIMER: THIS IS MY PERSONAL JUDGEMENT AND NO OBJECTIVE JUDGEMENT) and what made me go away from there are broken packages. There are zillions of packages but I did not manage to install a single one which resulted in a working application (LyX, mplayer, ...).

So all in all which one is the best for you? People told me that pdaXrom is more like a laptop environment, Cacko/Sharp ROM are more for PDA users and Angstrom is somewhere in between. I find this not very correct. Angstrom is nowhere in between, true that pdaXrom gives you laptop environment and Cacko/Sharp is somewhat directed towards PDA users. But Cacko does not evolve by now too much, so I miss some packages I would like to have. And the UI is also not usable like e.g. Palm OS. pdaXrom and Angstrom are useless when you turn the display into the handheld mode. And Debian is not going to be any better as work on UI is virtually zero.

From my point of view, there's a lot of energy invested into HW support and new kernels etc. That itself is laudable and great work is being done there. However for me this whole device boils down to GUI. And here Zaurus seems to be by now quite a poor gadget. Unfortunately. And it won't change unless somebody takes an opportunity, or some company doesn't come up with something portable to Z (Google phone, Ubuntu mobile?). What I mean is simple. I am not sure whether we need yet another layers of abstraction and application stacks. I think a lot can be achieved on the level of desktop and window manager. Something in direction Meanie tried to do, or Capn_Fish seems to go with the Celestial. As I said, Z is a close-to useless brick when you turn the display into the handheld mode. But enough of this elaboration...

So which distro is for you? No clue - depends on what you expect from the device. I myself have similar needs as you, plus an advanced text editing (LyX + LaTeX) and I decided for now for pdaXii13v2 and I am looking forward to see the r198. Reasons: very friendly and supportive community (just check the disucssions to see how newbies are handled), drive for configurability (exactly what I need if I want to customize the system to my own needs), by default already IMHO the nicest and at the same time reasonably working PDA-like GUI outhere (OpenBox + Matchbox with beautiful icons and working desktop) and mostly working packages. And people like khazakov and Capn_Fish who compile on request almost anything you need (probably the biggest plus - thanks guys   ). r198 seems to be much faster, however there are still some quirks (crappy sound and some broken configurations). And finally, for the PDA usability, there seems to be the biggest configuration support already done for my own games with window manager.

The last advice: do some flashing in order to find out what you want... You probably won't get around it anyway .

12

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Pdaxii13v2 Packages

« on: October 30, 2007, 04:57:26 pm »

I wanted to install pdaxii13v2 and Meanie's page links to http://www.tyrannozaurus.com/feed/beta3/pd...a1_armv5tel.ipk . But this link is broken. However instead version 4.4.0, the version 5.5.0 from http://www.tyrannozaurus.com/feed/beta3/pd...a1_armv5tel.ipk. But on Akita it leaves only 15MB on NAND free...

13

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Wireless Cf With Best Support

« on: October 29, 2007, 07:07:49 am »

Ok ... as my Planex is giving more and more problems, it needs replacement. I don't want to get another planex, because the plastic broke so easily ... in the first 5 days or so.

I'm searching for a not-so-expensive ( max about 35-40 euro with shipping ) and compatible with beta 3 and latest pdaxrom versions.

I've encountered so far linksys wcf11 which is about 50$ with shipping, BUT i don't have any idea if it's fully compatible with pdaxrom ... i could not find anything in the forum that says "ok it works great" or the opposite.

Any ideas for WIFI cards ? The most important thing is the compatibility with beta3, then with latest pdaxrom, and then with OpenBSD. And after the compatibility comes the durability  I want that plastic to last at least few months .. and no - I don't drop it.

I recently purchased D-Link DCF 660W. It works with pdaxiiv13v2, r198 and Angstrom. Seems to be fairly "usual" card. The only problem were problems with orinoco vs. hostap drivers, but to sort out that is easy. Design seems to be robust enough, although I do not know what are your requirements. It goes went on German eBay for a fixed price 45.- EUR (new) and used can be bought for around 20-30.- EUR. Check e.g. here. Pulster sells it for 69.-.

14

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Want Compiled Thread?

« on: October 28, 2007, 07:10:48 pm »

I'd like to use LyX and Latex (well, that's for me one big point why I bought Z). I know this is a long term itch for many. What I found is this page: http://yonggun.googlepages.com/scientificpdaxrom (also linked from tyrannozaurus). Could LyX and tex/latex (e.g. tetex, or texlive distro) find a way to the official feeds?

Thanks.

15

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Pdaxii13v2: First Collection Of Experiences

« on: October 28, 2007, 03:59:09 pm »

I have two wifi cards, one uses orinoco and the other uses hostap. both work for me. the problem as i mentioned before is that some wifi cards have identical manfids even though they are very different cards and need different drivers. Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done for those wifi cards. It will always be working for some and not for others out of the box for wifi cards that have those conflicting manfids. removing the unwanted driver or manually fixing the config files is the only way to get those cards working...

Well, I am no Linux driver expert and I do not see deep into the driver stuff in pdaXrom. However, developers always ask for "pccardctl info" record for the card. What do they do with it? I guess, it belongs to some config, right? Theoretically (according to Google), this should go to /etc/pcmcia/config, or hostap_cs.conf. But such files do not exist in the newest pdaXrom (r198). So where are these things? Blacklisting does not work either...