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Messages - piku

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1
C1000/3x00 Hardware / Alive?
« on: February 22, 2015, 12:29:56 pm »
Anyone still alive here?  I got my zaurus back out and I finally got wpa working on cacko 1.23 lite on my SL-C3000 so it will hopefully have some new utility.  I can't believe that zaurus has less attention and support these days than my 25 year old Atari computers

2
C1000/3x00 Hardware / Busted Zaurus!
« on: May 14, 2006, 02:17:48 pm »
Quote
I use the headphone port so often that i have to consider soldering a new one in due to exsesive wear and tear
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=126471\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Like I said guys, I've tried pretty much everything that is basic or easy.  Several different pairs of headphones, and microphones still work so the jack itself is working in some fashion.  When I plug in the remote control it no longer works.  Clearly something hardware related is gone.

Thanks,
Mark

3
C1000/3x00 Hardware / I Borked My Battery
« on: May 09, 2006, 08:28:06 pm »
Quote
   thanks.. that is what i thought.  It would be crazy just to stuff a bunch of compounds in plastic without securing it.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=126253\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

However, dropped lithium ion batteries have a propensity for exploding.  Just google for cell phone exploding battery.  Rare, but possible.  

Thanks,
Mark

4
C1000/3x00 Hardware / Busted Zaurus!
« on: May 09, 2006, 08:27:02 pm »
Quote
which distro are you running, if its OZ then i can help you (try alsamixer and scroll to the right and turn off the speaker then scroll left to the "jack" option and change it to headphone)
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=126248\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Nah, I am running cacko.  And I don't think it's anything software related.  The switch used to be automatic.  I do hear crackling in the headphones as I plug them in or unplug them, but nonetheless it refuses to switch over, even after hard reboot.  Kind of weird considering I don't even use the headphone port that much compared to some people.

5
C1000/3x00 Hardware / Busted Zaurus!
« on: May 09, 2006, 12:18:15 am »
Hey guys,

After a little over 6 months of ownership, my heavily used SL-C3000 has developed a problem.  The audio doesn't switch over to headphones when you plug them into the socket.  I've tried pretty much everything you'd suggest, it definitely seems to be a hardware issue.

Any suggestions?  I think I'm going to have to crack it open or send it back, both of which I'd really rather not do.

Thanks,
Mark

6
C1000/3x00 General discussions / Cacko Slc3k Settings/rotation Issues
« on: January 16, 2006, 12:21:49 pm »
Quote
Hey guys,

I recently installed the latest version of BVDD SDL, and I copied 2 binaries (snes9x and znester) to /opt/QtPalmtop/bin/ and somehow after that my pda has been really f-ed up.  Basically the symptoms are that on initial bootup, it displays the startup screen.  Eventually it displays the task bar.  It used to ask me to set the time and it no longer asks me to do that.  After displaying hte task bar and getting hard drive churn for another 20-30 seconds the screen promptly rotates.  Hitting rotation in the menu does nothing.  Folding the screen over the keyboard (which normally rotates it into the position it's in) causes it to rotate upside down!  Initially when this first happened, my power settings were all set back to default as were my appearance settings.  Something definitely happened somewhere.  Any assistance would be great.

Also. A cacko/tetsu 18a kernel bug...  My PNY 512MB SD card causes a complete system crash.  But only when the pda automatically powers off after the timeout period on batteries.  When you turn the zaurus on, it will reboot from scratch.  But this is the important part, ONLY after you let it power itself off.  If you power it off using hte on/off switch, it won't crash.

Again, Thanks for any assistance!

Mark
[div align=\"right\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Fixed,

Could be two things:

1. I ssh'd in and adjusted resolution.conf to be Rot270 instead of Rot0 before the system booted up.
2. I followed this howto: [a href=\"https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=4183]https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=4183[/url]

One of them did the trick

Thanks,
Mark

7
C1000/3x00 General discussions / Cacko3k Feedback
« on: January 14, 2006, 01:24:02 pm »
Quote
Quote
I am not sure if it is a bug or not
The Z has crushed several times at the same point
it is about the display with magnified screen
(tap on the icon of some games, and there will be this option)
whenever this is clicked, and i run the app it may crush sometimes(not all the times)
but if i unclicked this , it works!
however, there is always some app work better with this option clicked
the game is here http://www.cs.unc.edu/~scheuerm/froot/froot_0.7.1_arm.ipk
not only this game, but other are the same when the option is clicked , it may crush during the process to magnify the screen
www.oesf.org/index.php?act=findpost&pid=96977
That is exactly what I noticed, and decided to avoid this version .
www.oesf.org/index.php?act=findpost&pid=97083

Installing a newer SDL (like the one with BVDD) might curb this behavior.  If you use any SDL applications and you have the slzaurus version installed, that's your prob.   I haven't had that crash for a long time now.

8
C1000/3x00 General discussions / Cacko Slc3k Settings/rotation Issues
« on: January 14, 2006, 01:17:56 pm »
Hey guys,

I recently installed the latest version of BVDD SDL, and I copied 2 binaries (snes9x and znester) to /opt/QtPalmtop/bin/ and somehow after that my pda has been really f-ed up.  Basically the symptoms are that on initial bootup, it displays the startup screen.  Eventually it displays the task bar.  It used to ask me to set the time and it no longer asks me to do that.  After displaying hte task bar and getting hard drive churn for another 20-30 seconds the screen promptly rotates.  Hitting rotation in the menu does nothing.  Folding the screen over the keyboard (which normally rotates it into the position it's in) causes it to rotate upside down!  Initially when this first happened, my power settings were all set back to default as were my appearance settings.  Something definitely happened somewhere.  Any assistance would be great.

Also. A cacko/tetsu 18a kernel bug...  My PNY 512MB SD card causes a complete system crash.  But only when the pda automatically powers off after the timeout period on batteries.  When you turn the zaurus on, it will reboot from scratch.  But this is the important part, ONLY after you let it power itself off.  If you power it off using hte on/off switch, it won't crash.

Again, Thanks for any assistance!

Mark

9
C1000/3x00 General discussions / Qpe-gaim/cacko Problem
« on: October 28, 2005, 11:25:04 pm »
Alright I give up.  Why doesn't qpe-gaim's buzzer work under cacko or sharp rom but does under opie?  They are different versions and all but still.  From what I can find, qpe-gaim calls the buzzer with the following code:

        ODevice::inst()->alarmSound();

A snipped of embedded-konsole source reveals the following:

        QCopEnvelope( "QPE/TaskBar", "soundAlarm()" );

But the QCop stuff seems completely different.  I don't know any QT so I'm pretty much 100% lost.  Can anyone shed some light on this and get me beeping again :-P

Thanks,
Mark

10
C1000/3x00 General discussions / Bugs Bugs And More Bugs
« on: October 28, 2005, 08:11:14 pm »
Quote
piku: nice written text - It was good reading.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=101078\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Thanks for your help too hrw.  I really appreciate how helpful everyone was.  That's the single reason why I have a lot of confidence in openzaurus in the long term.  In a short amount of time, it'll definitely be the best way to go.

Thanks,
Mark

11
C1000/3x00 General discussions / Bugs Bugs And More Bugs
« on: October 26, 2005, 09:25:37 pm »
Quote
Hello all.  This post is intended to help newbies to the SL-C3000 and by extension the SL-CXXX series of PDA's.  It's important to note that this post qualifies to right now *only*.  I'm a veteran Linux systems administrator and typically I wear the developer hat.  The Zaurus PDA humbles me and makes my end user hat much bigger and my developer hat quite small.  You can know linux really well and the semantics of the pda and the embedded architecture will confuse you.  Knowing the difference between a rootfs and a NAND flash image, etc is all very complicated, and someone needs to explain it.  I aim to at some point.  But the question that I had, and most newbies have is what is that killer ROM.  What should I be using to get the most cool features and stability?

So where are we?  The choices.  We currently have:

Sharp ROM:

Sharp ROM is an embeddix 2.4.18 kernel that has been quoted by many to be a huge mess.  There's a nice Tetsu replacement kernel.  With bvdd, you can play movies or SDL games at quite a nice speed.  Sharp rom of course is quite polished as you would expect with the original software like Hancom office and Netfront3.  It's also very bland.  I dislike the system font and the icons and a lot of other things.  It's definitely designed for business folk. It works well and is very stable.  Sharp ROM is supported very well by the community, which at first glance I didn't think was the case.  I'll explain why further on.

Cacko ROM:

Cacko is a modified Sharp ROM.  Though not supported officially IIRC, Tetsu kernel works perfectly with Cacko.  My experience shows that Cacko beta has precisely 0 bugs aside from an issue with resolution changes to 320x240 crashing the PDA (usually when executing doom).  Cacko has a better lookign system font, better icons and backgrounds and an overall better look and feel.  The bottom line thing to remember is that Cacko is quite similar to Sharp ROM because it's changes bolted onto Sharp ROM.  This has distinct advantages and disadvantages.

Openzaurus:

Yes Openzaurus for the SL-C3000 is usable now.  Openzaurus is designed for the developer community.  It is based on a much much much newer toolchain and a much much much newer linux kernel, 2.6.14, in fact.  One of the most recent Linux kernels in existence.  Openzaurus uses a replacement system called Opie which is based on Qtopia but has had a lot of community development done on it.  Quite frankly, Opie is prettier than Sharp ROM or even Cacko IMHO.  While in many ways Opie seems super mature, there's other ways in which it's a tad inferior.  There's an alternate environment called GPE which instead of being based on QT is instead based on GTK.  GTK on the desktop is very good, GTK on my PDA in my experience is not ready for primetime - again I'll explain my feelings below.

The dirt...

My usage.  I break things, I test new stuff, I like to try out things.  This typically works well on my desktop Linux PC where I'll try out things in VMware or dual booting or a number of different options.  The PC has a number of advantages over the zaurus but the main one really is the ability to select multiple kernel configurations and hence being truly a dual boot capable system.  This doesn't work on the spitz (SL-C3000) (yet).  What I didn't really count on so much when I started this endeavor is my need for my PDA.  I need it to be able to play movies and games, I need it to be stable for when I take notes in meetings or add tasks and calendar entries on the fly.  I need it to always be available to me.  I need the bluetooth to work as I quite often use it as a "sidekick" (always on in my pocket always connected to the internet).  This poses a unique problem as you will soon find - a huge conflict of interest in my usage patterns and my tendency to break stuff.

The timeline...

Sharp ROM: Immediately I found myself interested in the alternatives.  Sharp ROM was somewhat slow and some design decisions were made that I didn't like.  I hunted and found my alternative.  Cacko.

Cacko: While cacko wasn't any faster, it's better than Sharp ROM.  Cacko requires you to pretty much blow away everything on your PDA.  Installation was a major undertaking but one that I found was quite worth it.  Many things simply work properly under Cacko that didn't necessarily under Sharp ROM.  Cacko is super pretty.  The default font is extra readable and the background choices, etc are quite lovely.  Cacko with the exception of the nasty bug has worked well for me.  But I was just so curious about openzaurus...

Openzaurus: I finally found a way to install openzaurus without demolishing my cacko installation...  For me, my need for my stable pda required an easy path to return from whence I came.  I created a NAND flash backup (about 16MB flash backup) of my cacko installation and flashed openzaurus.  I created a 200MB disk image called oz.img on /dev/hda3 (the biggie vfat partition).  On this image I extracted the openzaurus rootfs .tar.gz file.  From there I flashed and rebooted.  Openzaurus promptly dumped me to a command prompt in emergency mode because it couldn't find my kernel.  No matter.  I edited /sbin/init on the oz flash image and told it to mount the oz.img and pivotboot off of that.  It worked!  I backed up this NAND and now had a "dual boot" system.  Once I got into Opie I had a lot of problems because of the way I did my "disk image" boot.  Opie displays a dialog whenever it finds new media asking if you want to scan it or something.  It doesn't respond to keyboard input.  It happens to display this before you calibrate the stylus!  Not cool.  You can run ts_calibrate in a command line console before opie starts to get around this.  Flash cacko NAND when I want to boot up into cacko, flash OZ nand when I want to boot up into openzaurus.  On the surface it seemed like a lot of issues I had before with openzaurus were solved.  With 3.5.4 (not released, not finished), fonts are a lot better (TRUE TYPE!) and sizes of things are better designed for such a high rez screen.  Openzaurus/Openembedded has a really neet crossbuild environment and I soon built my own openzaurus.  I had a problem with the 2.4 kernel where my on/off switch didn't do anything.  In addition the @ sign didn't work which created some issues for my SSHing.  It was totally obnoxious to me so I soon managed to get kernel 2.6.14 working.  Fixed the keymap up, fixed many things.  The on/off switch worked and power management seemed much better.  Problem after problem had a solution.... until....

I soon realized I had problems.  Sometimes the zaurus wouldn't turn back on after you sleep it.  The text editor failed to save my entry after I just finished taking notes at a meeting!!!!!!, the email client wouldn't connect to my imap server and failed to give me a reason why, there's no well working SDL/mplayer for oz and spitz yet so no video and no games.  The kernel is still being worked on so there's no sound or LED support.  Konqueror crashed on nearly every page - okay disable javascript and it's fine.  There's no office suite that comes close to Hancom which is installed by default on sharp rom or sharp rom based cacko.  I would have thought the community support would have been much better for openzaurus but it really seems to be targeted at sharp rom.  When coming back from sleeping it took a long time to kind of regain control of the pda.  If you played with the keyboard you would lose control fo the keyboard and have to restart opie.  If you played with the stylus you'd lose control of that and you'd have to restart opie.  This created a couple embarassing moments for me.  There's a much less significant bug in the calendaring where if you changed the day the week starts it affected the display but not the entering of a repeated entry.  Easy to work around, so no big deal.  Anyway, I thought I'd try GPE so I duplicated my efforts and extracted a gpe image onto gpe.img, another 200MB image.  moved it to oz.img and backed up oz.img and rebooted.  Booted into GPE which looked pretty nice, but not as pretty as opie IMHO.  The fonts were unrealistically large such that many dialogs were cut off.  A repeated attempt to change the theme resulted in crash after crash.  GPE was cooked for me, so I renamed my images back and rebooted.

Crap.  Both gpe.img and oz.img were showing as 0 bytes.  All my recent calendaring entries, etc were gone.  Crap crap crap.  I rebuilt my opie image from scratch and it really took less time than I thought it would to get things back up to speed.  After getting things back running I noticed a couple more issues.  The on/off switch still functioned when the display was closed.  This wasn't going to work for me as I often hit this button accidentally, either turning my z on when I want it off or off when I want it on in my pocket.  This resulted several times in a freshly dead battery when I needed it most.  Then things crashed again, I wasn't able to get my PDA turned back on and I was done.  Opie was cooked.  Back to Cacko.

And now we're back to Cacko.  I've come to realize that I took a couple things for granted.  For one, for the most part, everything works magnificently under cacko.  Despite complaints from others, apps like netfront3 and hancom office are best of breed from what I can tell.  The cacko rom displays text on the calendar month view which I liked better than the opie method of a color bar.  Most importantly, for me, I'll say it and say it again, that for the most part cacko rom works very well and has the most support of the "cool stuff" community.  That is tetsu kernel mods, a rockin cool mplayer,  sharp music player, hancom office, netfront, and now a BVDD SDL for high frame rate linux gaming.

You can probably tell by now that Cacko is getting an astounding endorsement from me.  The Cacko guys have it easier than the openzaurus guys.  Building off of the sharp rom, a lot of work is already done.  The cacko guys are taking something that works and making it look cool.  They have the advantage of the seemingly better community support for the Sharp ROM setup.  The openzaurus guys are undertaking a huge project in taking on all the work that sharp employees and other really smart Japanese guys do themselves.  Cacko will most likely become quite stagnant.  There's not going to be a lot of huge changes because the toolchain causes a lot of limitations.  The cause of the stability is also the achilles heel for future development.  Openzaurus is the future, unfortunately it's just not ready for primetime yet.  The difference between now and a couple months ago when I last tried it is nothing short of astounding.  Spitz is a relatively new platform and the openzaurus guys are still adjusting to it.  A lot of the devs simply can't afford a spitz or high end SL-CXXX PDA.  If you don't need your PDA to be perfectly stable and you have some development skills, then by all means you want openzaurus...  If you're like me and while you like to tweak things, you've come to depend on the rigid stability of your PDA then you'd do well to stick to cacko for now.

Rest assured I'll continue to try openzaurus, and when it reaches a stability that I desire, I'll be back here touting it as the best thing since sliced bread.  It kind of pained me to write this because the openzaurus/openembedded guys really are putting in an amazing effort.  I almost wish my PDA wasn't so integral to my life so that I could run openzaurus now instead of later, but I need it to do the cool things, I need it to be stable and I need it to be those things now, and Cacko for the most part fits the bill.  Openzaurus will be constantly updated.  It will be ready in no time.  This review should be taken in the context of now.  Tomorrow it might be invalid. 

I hope this gives someone a fresher view of what to expect from the different choices for Spitz.  There's also pdaXrom and Debian but I haven't tried either of those.  Both since they are based on X will probably feel slower than Sharp ROM or Cacko.  Additionally, regarding my speed comparisons, it's important to note that Openzaurus is *clearly* faster in almost every single way than Sharp ROM.  That alone might make it an attractive option to some guys.  If anyone wants me to explain the images of openzaurus and the ways that the NAND flash and hdd relate to each other on the SL-C3K, please don't hesitate to ask.  It's something that I was quite confused about and JustinP explained to me with the grace of a swan.  I got a lot of help getting things running from the openzaurus guys like JustinP and Richard Purdie.  There's good guys hanging out in the Openzaurus irc channel on freenode.  I really hope I didn't hurt anyone's feelings by giving a bad review of Openzaurus.  The idea behind it is fantastic, the implementation is going well and will be perfect soon...  And it's changing fast.  So remember, what applies right now may not be true a month from now. 

To all those who have worked so hard to make my zaurus so much more useful than it comes from the factory - for free -  Thank you.  Thank you all.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=101062\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Some things I forgot to mention.  A lot of the apps under openzaurus have a ton more features.  Things like the package manager and such are quite a bit better than the sharp rom equivalents.

12
C1000/3x00 General discussions / Bugs Bugs And More Bugs
« on: October 26, 2005, 09:05:10 pm »
Hello all.  This post is intended to help newbies to the SL-C3000 and by extension the SL-CXXX series of PDA's.  It's important to note that this post qualifies to right now *only*.  I'm a veteran Linux systems administrator and typically I wear the developer hat.  The Zaurus PDA humbles me and makes my end user hat much bigger and my developer hat quite small.  You can know linux really well and the semantics of the pda and the embedded architecture will confuse you.  Knowing the difference between a rootfs and a NAND flash image, etc is all very complicated, and someone needs to explain it.  I aim to at some point.  But the question that I had, and most newbies have is what is that killer ROM.  What should I be using to get the most cool features and stability?

So where are we?  The choices.  We currently have:

Sharp ROM:

Sharp ROM is an embeddix 2.4.18 kernel that has been quoted by many to be a huge mess.  There's a nice Tetsu replacement kernel.  With bvdd, you can play movies or SDL games at quite a nice speed.  Sharp rom of course is quite polished as you would expect with the original software like Hancom office and Netfront3.  It's also very bland.  I dislike the system font and the icons and a lot of other things.  It's definitely designed for business folk. It works well and is very stable.  Sharp ROM is supported very well by the community, which at first glance I didn't think was the case.  I'll explain why further on.

Cacko ROM:

Cacko is a modified Sharp ROM.  Though not supported officially IIRC, Tetsu kernel works perfectly with Cacko.  My experience shows that Cacko beta has precisely 0 bugs aside from an issue with resolution changes to 320x240 crashing the PDA (usually when executing doom).  Cacko has a better lookign system font, better icons and backgrounds and an overall better look and feel.  The bottom line thing to remember is that Cacko is quite similar to Sharp ROM because it's changes bolted onto Sharp ROM.  This has distinct advantages and disadvantages.

Openzaurus:

Yes Openzaurus for the SL-C3000 is usable now.  Openzaurus is designed for the developer community.  It is based on a much much much newer toolchain and a much much much newer linux kernel, 2.6.14, in fact.  One of the most recent Linux kernels in existence.  Openzaurus uses a replacement system called Opie which is based on Qtopia but has had a lot of community development done on it.  Quite frankly, Opie is prettier than Sharp ROM or even Cacko IMHO.  While in many ways Opie seems super mature, there's other ways in which it's a tad inferior.  There's an alternate environment called GPE which instead of being based on QT is instead based on GTK.  GTK on the desktop is very good, GTK on my PDA in my experience is not ready for primetime - again I'll explain my feelings below.

The dirt...

My usage.  I break things, I test new stuff, I like to try out things.  This typically works well on my desktop Linux PC where I'll try out things in VMware or dual booting or a number of different options.  The PC has a number of advantages over the zaurus but the main one really is the ability to select multiple kernel configurations and hence being truly a dual boot capable system.  This doesn't work on the spitz (SL-C3000) (yet).  What I didn't really count on so much when I started this endeavor is my need for my PDA.  I need it to be able to play movies and games, I need it to be stable for when I take notes in meetings or add tasks and calendar entries on the fly.  I need it to always be available to me.  I need the bluetooth to work as I quite often use it as a "sidekick" (always on in my pocket always connected to the internet).  This poses a unique problem as you will soon find - a huge conflict of interest in my usage patterns and my tendency to break stuff.

The timeline...

Sharp ROM: Immediately I found myself interested in the alternatives.  Sharp ROM was somewhat slow and some design decisions were made that I didn't like.  I hunted and found my alternative.  Cacko.

Cacko: While cacko wasn't any faster, it's better than Sharp ROM.  Cacko requires you to pretty much blow away everything on your PDA.  Installation was a major undertaking but one that I found was quite worth it.  Many things simply work properly under Cacko that didn't necessarily under Sharp ROM.  Cacko is super pretty.  The default font is extra readable and the background choices, etc are quite lovely.  Cacko with the exception of the nasty bug has worked well for me.  But I was just so curious about openzaurus...

Openzaurus: I finally found a way to install openzaurus without demolishing my cacko installation...  For me, my need for my stable pda required an easy path to return from whence I came.  I created a NAND flash backup (about 16MB flash backup) of my cacko installation and flashed openzaurus.  I created a 200MB disk image called oz.img on /dev/hda3 (the biggie vfat partition).  On this image I extracted the openzaurus rootfs .tar.gz file.  From there I flashed and rebooted.  Openzaurus promptly dumped me to a command prompt in emergency mode because it couldn't find my kernel.  No matter.  I edited /sbin/init on the oz flash image and told it to mount the oz.img and pivotboot off of that.  It worked!  I backed up this NAND and now had a "dual boot" system.  Once I got into Opie I had a lot of problems because of the way I did my "disk image" boot.  Opie displays a dialog whenever it finds new media asking if you want to scan it or something.  It doesn't respond to keyboard input.  It happens to display this before you calibrate the stylus!  Not cool.  You can run ts_calibrate in a command line console before opie starts to get around this.  Flash cacko NAND when I want to boot up into cacko, flash OZ nand when I want to boot up into openzaurus.  On the surface it seemed like a lot of issues I had before with openzaurus were solved.  With 3.5.4 (not released, not finished), fonts are a lot better (TRUE TYPE!) and sizes of things are better designed for such a high rez screen.  Openzaurus/Openembedded has a really neet crossbuild environment and I soon built my own openzaurus.  I had a problem with the 2.4 kernel where my on/off switch didn't do anything.  In addition the @ sign didn't work which created some issues for my SSHing.  It was totally obnoxious to me so I soon managed to get kernel 2.6.14 working.  Fixed the keymap up, fixed many things.  The on/off switch worked and power management seemed much better.  Problem after problem had a solution.... until....

I soon realized I had problems.  Sometimes the zaurus wouldn't turn back on after you sleep it.  The text editor failed to save my entry after I just finished taking notes at a meeting!!!!!!, the email client wouldn't connect to my imap server and failed to give me a reason why, there's no well working SDL/mplayer for oz and spitz yet so no video and no games.  The kernel is still being worked on so there's no sound or LED support.  Konqueror crashed on nearly every page - okay disable javascript and it's fine.  There's no office suite that comes close to Hancom which is installed by default on sharp rom or sharp rom based cacko.  I would have thought the community support would have been much better for openzaurus but it really seems to be targeted at sharp rom.  When coming back from sleeping it took a long time to kind of regain control of the pda.  If you played with the keyboard you would lose control fo the keyboard and have to restart opie.  If you played with the stylus you'd lose control of that and you'd have to restart opie.  This created a couple embarassing moments for me.  There's a much less significant bug in the calendaring where if you changed the day the week starts it affected the display but not the entering of a repeated entry.  Easy to work around, so no big deal.  Anyway, I thought I'd try GPE so I duplicated my efforts and extracted a gpe image onto gpe.img, another 200MB image.  moved it to oz.img and backed up oz.img and rebooted.  Booted into GPE which looked pretty nice, but not as pretty as opie IMHO.  The fonts were unrealistically large such that many dialogs were cut off.  A repeated attempt to change the theme resulted in crash after crash.  GPE was cooked for me, so I renamed my images back and rebooted.

Crap.  Both gpe.img and oz.img were showing as 0 bytes.  All my recent calendaring entries, etc were gone.  Crap crap crap.  I rebuilt my opie image from scratch and it really took less time than I thought it would to get things back up to speed.  After getting things back running I noticed a couple more issues.  The on/off switch still functioned when the display was closed.  This wasn't going to work for me as I often hit this button accidentally, either turning my z on when I want it off or off when I want it on in my pocket.  This resulted several times in a freshly dead battery when I needed it most.  Then things crashed again, I wasn't able to get my PDA turned back on and I was done.  Opie was cooked.  Back to Cacko.

And now we're back to Cacko.  I've come to realize that I took a couple things for granted.  For one, for the most part, everything works magnificently under cacko.  Despite complaints from others, apps like netfront3 and hancom office are best of breed from what I can tell.  The cacko rom displays text on the calendar month view which I liked better than the opie method of a color bar.  Most importantly, for me, I'll say it and say it again, that for the most part cacko rom works very well and has the most support of the "cool stuff" community.  That is tetsu kernel mods, a rockin cool mplayer,  sharp music player, hancom office, netfront, and now a BVDD SDL for high frame rate linux gaming.

You can probably tell by now that Cacko is getting an astounding endorsement from me.  The Cacko guys have it easier than the openzaurus guys.  Building off of the sharp rom, a lot of work is already done.  The cacko guys are taking something that works and making it look cool.  They have the advantage of the seemingly better community support for the Sharp ROM setup.  The openzaurus guys are undertaking a huge project in taking on all the work that sharp employees and other really smart Japanese guys do themselves.  Cacko will most likely become quite stagnant.  There's not going to be a lot of huge changes because the toolchain causes a lot of limitations.  The cause of the stability is also the achilles heel for future development.  Openzaurus is the future, unfortunately it's just not ready for primetime yet.  The difference between now and a couple months ago when I last tried it is nothing short of astounding.  Spitz is a relatively new platform and the openzaurus guys are still adjusting to it.  A lot of the devs simply can't afford a spitz or high end SL-CXXX PDA.  If you don't need your PDA to be perfectly stable and you have some development skills, then by all means you want openzaurus...  If you're like me and while you like to tweak things, you've come to depend on the rigid stability of your PDA then you'd do well to stick to cacko for now.

Rest assured I'll continue to try openzaurus, and when it reaches a stability that I desire, I'll be back here touting it as the best thing since sliced bread.  It kind of pained me to write this because the openzaurus/openembedded guys really are putting in an amazing effort.  I almost wish my PDA wasn't so integral to my life so that I could run openzaurus now instead of later, but I need it to do the cool things, I need it to be stable and I need it to be those things now, and Cacko for the most part fits the bill.  Openzaurus will be constantly updated.  It will be ready in no time.  This review should be taken in the context of now.  Tomorrow it might be invalid.  

I hope this gives someone a fresher view of what to expect from the different choices for Spitz.  There's also pdaXrom and Debian but I haven't tried either of those.  Both since they are based on X will probably feel slower than Sharp ROM or Cacko.  Additionally, regarding my speed comparisons, it's important to note that Openzaurus is *clearly* faster in almost every single way than Sharp ROM.  That alone might make it an attractive option to some guys.  If anyone wants me to explain the images of openzaurus and the ways that the NAND flash and hdd relate to each other on the SL-C3K, please don't hesitate to ask.  It's something that I was quite confused about and JustinP explained to me with the grace of a swan.  I got a lot of help getting things running from the openzaurus guys like JustinP and Richard Purdie.  There's good guys hanging out in the Openzaurus irc channel on freenode.  I really hope I didn't hurt anyone's feelings by giving a bad review of Openzaurus.  The idea behind it is fantastic, the implementation is going well and will be perfect soon...  And it's changing fast.  So remember, what applies right now may not be true a month from now.  

To all those who have worked so hard to make my zaurus so much more useful than it comes from the factory - for free -  Thank you.  Thank you all.

13
C1000/3x00 General discussions / Sl-c3000 Sound/equalizer
« on: September 17, 2005, 02:37:14 am »
Hello all,

Perhaps my ears are just damaged but it's my opinion that the zaurus puts out unbalanced sound.  As far as I can tell the low end is turned down below 0 and the high end seems over 0.  The result is that when I hook it up to my car stereo, the subwoofer is not exercised properly, and the tweeters make me deaf   However, there doesn't seem to be an equalizer on the zaurus or any zaurus apps.  Is this really the case?  Would I have to equalize in software?  I'm stuck using the awkward interface on my car stereo to balance things to my liking and it's kind of obnoxious since I could just fix the zaurus and like the sound better both in the car and in headphones.

Thanks for any comments,
Mark

14
C1000/3x00 General discussions / Use An Sl-c3k As A Sidekick?!
« on: September 02, 2005, 03:01:44 pm »
Quote
This sounds like an interesting idea, something I've had in the back of my mind for a long while except that I was thinking of using WiFi as there's a network everywhere here at uni.

Okay, couple things here.  First of all, Wifi draws a significant amount of power compared to bluetooth.  I think the low range bluetooth cards draw something like 17ma and many of the wifi cards IDLE at 250ma, and draw a lot more during send/receive.  Needless to say, I get around 4 hours of battery life with wifi enabled, not to mention the wifi card and the zaurus gets particularly hot.  Not good for my pocket   So, IMHO wifi is no good for always on.  Another comment was why the need for always on.  The answer is because there is no server component to aim.  If I could run a server that would queue my aim messages and then relay them to my zaurus whenever the zaurus signed on to check for messages, the system would be perfect.  But for aim to work properly the system must always be on and connected.  This is an interesting need though, and I wonder if a protocol plugin for gaim could be made that - well... connects to itself (running on your desktop at home).  Of course turning on to check your email once every 1-2 minutes would be fine.  

My primary gripe honestly, is how simple GPRS is compared to Wifi.  You turn it on, and it's ready to go.  wifi, you have to futz around with finding an AP, then hoping it connects right.  Then choosing the right AP based on distance, etc.  Then there's the question of whether or not the moronic owner who left it unencrypted would be likely to be mad about you using their AP, etc.  I always thought Wifi would be a decent solution, and it is for rural areas (astoundingly), but not in the city where every single AP is a pay AP (I refuse).

My main interest is in having an always ready internet connection so if for some reason I feel like looking up directions on mapquest or something, it's a hop skip and a jump kind of thing.  And having my zaurus randomly yell at me to let me know it has email or something is cool

15
C1000/3x00 General discussions / Use An Sl-c3k As A Sidekick?!
« on: September 01, 2005, 09:20:22 am »
Quote
instead of the belkin I would choose a socket bt cf card, since it fits perfect inside the cf slot. I have it and it looks very nice.

For your idea to work (which I have also thought about it, but I don't have a data unlimited plan, sigh), i would suggest:

do a script to:
 start cf card
 connect to network & get info
 disconnect network
 power down cf card
 sleep x minutes

on the other hand, you are supposed to have your cell bluetooth open all the time, thus draining more battery from your phone as well as, depending on the phone model and bluetooth capabilities, it could be a data-security risk.

Just some thougths, waiting for you to post your findings !!
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Well I'm realizing that Belkin card doesn't work now so I'm hunting for a socket or ambicom.  I would have an unlimited data plan.  For the system to be effective for me, I'd really need it to be on and idling, always ready to receive data.  I don't know how it could be any more of a data security risk than using hte bluetooth anyway.  My cell phone is setup to not pair with any devices unless you tell it it can.  The cell phone is a Sony Ericcson - whatever their cheapest model that has a camera in it is.  I'm getting it explicitly for GPRS so that I don't wear the battery in the zaurus.  That and I can get it for $12 versus $180 for CF GPRS.

Thanks,
Mark

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