Messages

1

Sharp ROMs / Development For Cacko 1.22a

« on: April 09, 2005, 10:02:48 am »

Further to my last post I realise that actually I can't build the kernel at all with the patches applied, it's completely broken right from the words make bzImage (am I even supposed to be doing make bzImage for the Zaurus?).

So if possible I would also appreciate a diff from the kernel.org vesion of 2.4.18 to whichever version Cacko 1.22 uses. Some hints on which commands to run to build the kernel woul also be appreciated.

Thanks,
- Cj

2

Sharp ROMs / Development For Cacko 1.22a

« on: April 09, 2005, 09:56:10 am »

Hi.

So my quest to get my crappy prism3 based wireless card working in the latest version of cacko continues (see my earlier post). It seems the best way for me to proceed to is to get the latest version of the hostap or wlan-ng drivers compiled into the kernel and the resepective userspace utilities installed.

I managed to apply most of the 1.22 kernel patches from the new cacko website to the sharp kernel sources linked to on the Japanese site. There were some discrepencies but they seem mostly irrlevant and/or because I don't have version 0.2.4 of the hostap drivers unpacked into the root of the kernel source (?).

But while I might be able to build the kernel okay using any old arm5 cross compiler (I have the one from the pdaxrom sdk lying around), I don't know how to build userspace applications to target the new 1.22 cacko ROM with all its various uptodate libraries etc. Please can someone give me some pointers...

Also once I've built stuff for userspace is there some clean way to go from make install -> ipk ?

Thanks,
- CJ

3

Sharp ROMs / Cacko 1.22 Rom + Nl-2511cf Mercury

« on: April 07, 2005, 05:10:08 pm »

Unfortunatly just disabling the auto-connect doesn't work for me, the problem is deeper than that. To be more precise, I can actually get wireless access by disabling auto-connect and then manually entering the essid, and I can even use Kismet to find a usuable essid. Having done this though the device is unsuably unstable, with the dmesgs dumping out lots of errors about timeouts.

Basically as I see it is that these cards which are infact Prism3 based (correction from my initial post), and complete rubbish:
Story of Saneo 2511 devices

This flakeyness means that to get such cards working properly is completely hit and miss. Since my last post I've wasted almost a day trying to get this wretched piece of crap to work. Specifically I've tried:

* Building my own kernel to try getting wlan-ng support back in. This was a deadend though, I gave up when the cacko-1.21 patch set didn't cleanly apply to the kernel sources linked to from the cacko website. Also I have no idea how to go about cross-compiling the user space utilities, or even how to install the Japanese hacks back into the kernel I'll need for the E<->J program later.

* Copying out the wlan-ng prism2 drivers from Cacko-1.21b. Wishful thinking, but didn't work as it seems ABI has changed too much (kernel panic in one of the user space programs).

* Copying out the hostap stuff from OpenZaurus-3.5.2. This was interesting, in OZ my wireless card works okay with the hostap drivers, and the modules seem to match up enough with the cacko kernel to work correctly. However while they seem to work correctly, they exhibit the same malfunctioning behaviour as the original Cacko ones.

From this I've concluded to fix my card I either need to modify the user space stuff to be like in OZ where it does work (no idea where to start). Or get wlan-ng back into cacko 1.22a, which also seems beyond my understanding.

So thanks to all those who replied so far, any help or other suggestions would be welcomed.
-Cj

4

Sharp ROMs / Cacko 1.22 Rom + Nl-2511cf Mercury

« on: April 06, 2005, 07:14:48 pm »

Hi,

I have a C860 with a NL-2511CF Mercury (prism2 based afik) wireless card. Unfortunatly it does not seem to work using the hostap drivers included with this ROM. It does however work with the hostap drivers supplied with OpenZaurus 3.5.2, and may have worked at somepoint with the wlan-ng drivers (I don't remember).

I'd really like to use the latest version of the Cacko ROM as I'm about to go to Japan and hopefuly will find the E/J program very useful, but would still like everything else to be in perfect english. However for me, I also find that wireless networking is essential for the Zaurus to turn it from a colourful brick into a usable computer ; ).

So:

* Has anoyine else managed to get such a card working in the latest ROM? How?
   (I have also tried turning off the autoconnect networking option, but this does not help me to connect to a network for which I don't know the essid)

* Is there a wlan-ng package (as was suggested in the original 1.22ROM post) I could try? I can't find one...

* Has anyone built a kernel (perhaps for other prism2 based cards) with hostap drivers which might work with this device?

Thanks in advance,
- Cj

5

Sharp ROMs / Cacko 1.22 Rom + Nl-2511cf Mercury

« on: April 06, 2005, 07:14:00 pm »

Hi,

I have a C860 with a NL-2511CF Mercury (prism2 based afik) wireless card. Unfortunatly it does not seem to work using the hostap drivers included with this ROM. It does however work with the hostap drivers supplied with OpenZaurus 3.5.2, and may have worked at somepoint with the wlan-ng drivers (I don't remember).

I'd really like to use the latest version of the Cacko ROM as I'm about to go to Japan and hopefuly will find the E/J program very useful, but would still like everything else to be in perfect english. However for me, I also find that wireless networking is essential for the Zaurus to turn it from a colourful brick into a usable computer ; ).

So:

* Has anoyine else managed to get such a card working in the latest ROM? How?
   (I have also tried turning off the autoconnect networking option, but this does not help me to connect to a network for which I don't know the essid)

* Is there a wlan-ng package (as was suggested in the original 1.22ROM post) I could try? I can't find one...

* Has anyone built a kernel (perhaps for other prism2 based cards) with hostap drivers which might work with this device?

Thanks in advance,
- Cj

6

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Movie Playing

« on: November 08, 2004, 10:19:14 pm »

Am I the only one with a C860, who gets a system crash in RC5 upon pressing the extrernal on/off button after using mplayer with pretty much ANY command line configuration?

Do people know what (might be) causing this, or have found any work arounds?

Needless to say the impressiveness of the C860 playing an MPEG4 encoded movie is considerably degraded when the only way to turn it off afterwards is to rip the battery out!

- Cj

7

Zaurus - pdaXrom / NES(Nintendo) Emulator for pdaXrom?

« on: August 05, 2004, 05:35:15 pm »

I have also been looking for NES emulator for pdaXrom, without much success so far.

I have managed to both compile and run InfoNES and fceultra. However InfoNES runs way too fast with sound disabled, and way too slow with sound enabled. fceultra runs way too slow with or without sound.

Both were fairly easy to compile, should you want to do it yourself and have a play around.

- Cj

8

Zaurus - pdaXrom / mplayer and pdaXrom

« on: July 28, 2004, 01:48:44 pm »

I don't think mplayer in pdaXrom is a lost cause, it just doesn't work very well.

If all you want to do is watch a long movie (without stopping and starting, as you can't turn off your Z once you've run mplayer in its current state) you just have to follow the following recipe:

1. Install mplayer and all its dependencies from the pdaXrom stable feed

2. create a file called /etc/fb.modes which contains just:

mode "qvga"
geometry 320 240 320 240 16
timings 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
endmode

2. Drop to a console (for example run 'killall X' from a terminal)

3. Run from the command line:

mplayer -framedrop -vo fbdev -vm -fbmode qvga -ac mad file.avi
(you might also want to try -vo cvidix instead, but this doesn't work properly on my 860)

4. watch the movie

5. When mplayer exits the display will be garbled, and although you can 'startx' to restore it, you won't be able to turn off your Z. So best thing to do is to just run 'reboot'.


In order to play the movie at any reasonable rate, you will need to follow one of the many HOWTOs to downsample your movie. Particularly you probably want to drop the res. to exactly 320x240, and you might want to halve the frame rate of your movie.

This should work fine, but because mplayer is not well optimised (at least the pdaXrom version), you will find it gets a bit jerky in scenes with lots of motion.

- Cj

9

Zaurus - pdaXrom / mplayer and pdaXrom

« on: July 26, 2004, 09:19:22 pm »

Does the mplayer package in the stable pdaXrom feed include all of the features touted by the version of mplayer bundled with kino2? (i.e. ASM optimised DCT transforms, double buffering...)

If not, is there anywhere I can get the kino2 source to build their version of mplayer?

Also, I seem to be having a number of problems with the pdaXrom "stable" version of mplayer, particularly I find that on my C860:

* The w100 vidix driver doesn't work properly; it doesn't orient the overlay correctly, leaving the exposed edges full of garbage, and it seems to easily loose A/V sync even with -framedrop.

* If I run mplayer (from the console) and then load up X, pressing the external On/Off button causes the Z to crash.

Has anyone else run into these issues/found work arounds?

Thanks,
-Cj