Messages

1

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Sd Mount Problems On Boot

« on: May 07, 2005, 12:37:08 am »

Not unmouting the card cleanly will almost always cause filesytem corruption, including garbled and missing files. It is certainly the cause of your problems, no mystery here.

Your only options are to force an unmount of all SD partitions in the shutdown scripts, or remount the SD partitions as read-only during the shutdown scripts.

Of course, that won't help you in the case of a hard reboot, there is nothing you can do to prevent damage to the FS on the SD in this event.

It sucks, I know. I have the same problems and have just had to learn to live with it.

Make regular backups, and prepare to restore to them fairly often.

2

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Why Do You Still Use Oz 3.5.2 On Your 5500?

« on: May 04, 2005, 11:48:53 pm »

I'm not sure what you mean about the lack of SD support on the 5500.

OZ 3.5.3 has the most sane SD support yet. The card actually obeys fstab, and supports multiple partitions out of the box.

3

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Moving /opt /home On Oz 3.5.2

« on: April 16, 2005, 12:25:54 am »

Are you sure the SD card is working properly? What file system is it formatted to? It will have to be EXT2 for this to work.

4

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Moving /opt /home On Oz 3.5.2

« on: April 14, 2005, 11:27:37 pm »

All you should have to do to move /opt to the SD is:

1. Kill Opie
2. "cp -a /opt /mnt/card/opt"
3. "rm -rf /opt"
4. "ln -s /mnt/card/opt /opt"
5. Reboot

You didn't say if you are running Opie or not, but I just assumed you are.

Make sure not to make any mistakes with those lines, the 3rd one can destroy your system with ease.

5

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Oz 3.5.3 Wellenreiter Ii -- We V16/we V17

« on: April 14, 2005, 11:21:34 pm »

Good thing I saw this topic.

I have the same card as you, and was thinking of reflashing to 3.5.3. I think I'll have to wait until there is a fix for this problem first.

6

General Discussion / Psp Power Brick!

« on: April 12, 2005, 09:24:05 pm »

Here is a picture of the Power Brick with the Zaurus SL-5500:

[img]http://img49.echo.cx/img49/3479/powerbrick8em.jpg\" border=\"0\" class=\"linked-image\" /]

The cable is coiled up so it fits in the picture, it is about 3 feet long, much larger than what is shown online. Also notice it is actually black, even though I have seen it shown as purple online.

I was surprised at how light and small it is. It is considerably smaller and lighter than a GBA SP.

I just got this today, and mine didn't come with any sort of manual, so I was wondering if anyone knows what the green LED indicates? It was solid at first, but started to blink rapidly after charging for awhile.

It was funny buying this in the store and trying to explain why I was buying it, even though I didn't have a PSP, to the clerk.

7

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Some Problems With Oz

« on: April 08, 2005, 05:23:40 pm »

Good to know about the sdcontrol script. Is there any ETA for a stable release of OZ 3.5.3, or is it going by the "It's done when it's done" mantra of Slackware?

Watching the shutdown of my Zaurus, I have noted that every time I shut it down, the unmount command fails for my SD and gives the message that the file system is busy, so it just shuts down anyway.

I was thinking I could perhaps modify the shutdown script to sync the SD, then remount it read-only before shutdown. I used this method on an embedded distro that I developed which used a CF card for storage. The flash still isn't unmounted, but since it is synced and read-only at shutdown, there are no data-loss problems.

8

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Some Problems With Oz

« on: April 07, 2005, 10:00:16 pm »

This is my first post here, so forgive me if this isn't strictly in the correct forum.

I just got a SL-5000 2 days ago, and flashed it to the latest OZ. Since then, I have had to reflash it a few times due to a number of problems I am having.

After flashing to OZ (with the 40/24 kernel) I realized I had nowhere near enough space on the thing, so I used a 256 MB SD card to expand my storage. I have 2 partitions on the SD, the first a 100 MB FAT32 parititon so I can swap files between the PC and Zaurus easily, and the second is a 150 MB EXT2 partition to hold the system files.

After some modifications to the sdcontrol file, I have the Zaurus mounting both partitions as /mnt/card and /mnt/card2 automatically.

On /mnt/card2, I have placed /opt and /usr, with symlinks to the root FS on the internal flash (I also ran the necessary commands to make symlinks to the busybox commands so the system boots properly).

This has worked fine, except for one serious problem.

Since the SD is now an integral part of the file system, and I can't put a journalizing file system on it, every time the system locks hard enough to require a hard restart by cutting the power, which it does fairly often (no offense intended to OZ, I have developed some embedded Linux systems myself, so I know perfection is very difficult if not impossible to achieve), I often lose files in /opt and /usr, making the Zaurus unbootable or generally broken. Now I have backups to restore to when this happens, but I would obviously like to avoid this problem completely. I also have had problems since OZ isn't cleanly unmounting the card at shutdown.

So after that fairly long intro, here come the real questions:

1. Is there a way to make OZ cleanly unmount the SD when it shuts down?
2. Is there a way to make OZ run an fsck on the SD at boot?

I've been working on the second problem for awhile, but I seem to be getting stuck with the way OZ handles the SD. The SD doesn't seem to obey what is in fstab, and seems to be controlled by sdmgr. However, when I tried to disable sdmgr, the card stoped working, since the kernel module for it was no longer being loaded.

So I am trying to figure out how to get the SD to work like any other block device, and control it from fstab without needing sdmgr.

Sorry if this has run a bit long, I'm just in a bit of a bind here, since at this rate, I am going to need at least daily backups before I can safely use the Zaurus as a full time PDA.