Messages

1

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Resurrecting A Collie

« on: March 01, 2009, 10:05:40 am »

Fn+D+P+reset -> call girlfrend or wife to help you press this buttons
EXIT: on page 3, 4th option then i think reset..

Thanks I will try that.

try buy replacement battery on ebay cheap, I bought it last year from Hong Kong and its quite good.

I actually bought four replacement batteries from two separate suppliers (one American and one German). All batteries are made in China but they seem to come from two different manufacturers. Each battery powered the Collie flawlessly but once depleted it refused to recharge (except under a Sharp ROM). I will try the service menu and see what I can tweak.

Thanks,
z.

2

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Resurrecting A Collie

« on: February 19, 2009, 06:08:54 pm »

Hi all,

I've been trying to bring my trusty SL-5500 back to life. I have successfully set up OpenEmbedded, built and flashed kexecboot. I'm currently stuck on a few issues:

1. SD card isn't really working. An Angstrom image unpacked onto an ext2 SD partition is recognized by kexecboot but booting ends with a flurry of error messages like this:

Buffer I/O error on device mmcblk0p1, logical block 8
mmcblk0: retrying using single block read
mmcblk0: error -22 sending status comand<3>mmcblk0: error -22 sending read/write command, response 0x4, card status 0xff04
end_request: I/O error, dev mmcblk0, sector 104
...

The same error messages turn up if I boot from ROM or a CF card and then insert an SD card. The most recent kernel I've tried this with is from this morning (19 February 2009) and it's a 2.6.28. I have seen this with two different cards from two different manufacturers. I have tested the cards for errors on a different machine and they seem to be OK.

2. An Opie image on a CF card boots up to the "Tap anywhere..." screen where it freezes.

3. Battery charging doesn't work. When the charger is connected the LED doesn't light up and the battery stays discharged even after several hours. I've established that this isn't a hardware problem - when I flash a Sharp ROM (from http://www.myzaurus.com/ROMupdate5.asp) everything works as it's supposed to.

Any help with any of these issues will be appreciated. A few particular questions:

- regarding issue 3: I've read about a "service menu" accessible by pressing some key or key combination while connecting the charger. Supposedly one can set various voltage thresholds in the menu but I've never been able to get to it in the first place. Anyone know any details?

- regarding issue 1: I have a vague impression that the first OE images I built a couple weeks ago didn't have the SD card problem. Is there a particular node in the git tree that's been verified to have working SD support on collie? Also, would anyone be willing to check SD access on a current OE image on their own collie?

The device is otherwise pretty functional - I can even ssh to the collie over a USB cable. I think I'll make the thing useful again eventually.

Thanks,

z.

3

5x00 General discussions / Kernel 2.6

« on: August 04, 2006, 04:17:50 am »

Oh boy,

looks like I haven't visited OESF since May 2005. Time flies.

Anyway: I would also love to have a 2.6-based distro on my Collie. If I remember correctly there was always a problem with the SD card driver - it was a closed-source module from Sharp and they refused to release the code or any specs. Is this still a problem or has there been some progress?

Cheers,
z.

4

Software / Zaurus Port Of Treeline

« on: May 22, 2005, 08:01:05 am »

I have spent some time living under SharpROM 3.13 and come up with an ipk that installs without crashing and produces a working icon on the Applications tab.

There are some limitations, of course. I've given up on registering .trl files as a mime typ e in Qtopia because I couldn't get TreeLine to associate properly with them. At best, TreeLine would launch upon tapping on a file's icon but it didn't receive the file name on the command line - apparently Qtopia uses the QWidget::setDocument() slot to implement the association but I couldn't get it to work.

I also updated the OZ ipk with one small bugfix (resizing when an input method area pops up). I can now finally leave SharpROM, re-flash OZ and move ahead with other things.

Cheers,
z.

5

Python / Python Kopsis Image & Qdateedit

« on: May 15, 2005, 03:41:28 pm »

I suspect it's not a Python limitation but rather one of those imposed by Sharp's implementation of Qt/Embedded. See the Trolltech site for details.

z.

6

Software / Phone J2me Apps Work On Zaurus?

« on: May 14, 2005, 03:10:29 am »

No, the version of J2ME available for the Zaurus uses a different profile (PP) than what is used in phones (MIDP). Technically, MIDP is a subset of PP but it has extension packages which, as far as I know, are not available for the Zaurus - mainly javax.microedition.lcdui and related.

I once wrote a proof-of-concept game that ran on both the Zaurus and a J2ME phone but it required an abstraction layer to sort out the platform differences.

z.

7

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Issues With Using 3.5.3 On A Sl5500 Collie

« on: May 12, 2005, 05:57:10 am »

Set a password on your Z (as ssh on OZ won't accept an empty password).

Not true, actually. You do need to set a password before you can ssh into Z but it can be an empty password. So you open Console, enter "passwd" and just confirm an empty password twice. At least on my machine it only gives a warning.

z.

8

Software / Ipkg Package Compatibility - Newbie Question

« on: May 12, 2005, 01:44:57 am »

If I'm correct, they are compatible but only one way. The older variant of the ipkg format uses tar compression while the newer version uses ar. OpenZaurus (OZ) can process both versions of the format but Sharp ROM only deals with the older one.

So you should be able to install any package on OZ but whether or not the software will run is another question. The Opie environment used in OZ is derived from Qtopia (what the Sharp ROM uses) but they are slowly diverging and compatibility is broken for many non-trivial applications. There is a Sharp compatibility package for OZ (sharp-compat-oz) that will help in many cases.

My advice would be to give it a try, you can always uninstall. And do check out OZ feeds - there are over 2000 packages there already.

Cheers,
z.

9

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Oz Documentation Project

« on: May 11, 2005, 02:49:41 am »

It's rather embarrassing to make a typo in the headline of a supposedly revised page  I humbly thank you for pointing it out. The text is actually not intended for the 5600 at all. It is now fixed (same URL).

z.

10

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Oz Documentation Project

« on: May 10, 2005, 05:08:17 pm »

Thanks for the password. As a first step, I have revised installation instructions for SL-5500 and SL-5600. The text was very comprehensive and informative but I thought it could use some improvements. I had two major goals in particular:

1. Making the text as friendly to an absolute newbie as is humanly possible.
2. Making important pieces of information more visually distinct.

In order to help with goal number 2, I introduced two CSS styles through a <style> tag:

.tip { font-style: italic; color: #004000 }
.note { font-style: italic; color: #802000 }

However, wordpress suppresses them which I think is a shame. If someone could add these two rules to the stylesheet used at openzaurus.org (perhaps with more sensible colors) it would help raise the quality of all wiki contents.

The revised installation instructions are at http://openzaurus.org/wordpress/not-in-men...l-5600-revised/. I would appreciate feedback from anyone - please leave comments under the page. If the feedback is positive, we can replace the original instructions with this new version and I will proceed to revise more pages in a similar style.

Cheers,
z.

11

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Oz Documentation Project

« on: May 06, 2005, 07:54:30 am »

Mickeyl: The openzaurus.org site allows me to attach comments to an article but does not let me edit the article itself. So it is not really useable as a wiki.

If there is a proper wiki section I couldn't find it (I used the search textbox in the top-right corner). Maybe I need to register somewhere in order to edit articles but I could not find a registration screen either. If I need to register and then beg someone for edit privileges, I won't bother.

Cheers,
z.

EDIT: Silly me, I just found the registration option under Login. I'm waiting for my password to arrive.

12

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Oz Documentation Project

« on: May 05, 2005, 08:37:08 am »

A while ago I set up an OpenZaurus wiki at my homepage - http://www.journey.sk/zwiki/index.php/UserManual. This was shortly before the big OESF changes etc. If anyone feels like it please feel free to work there. The site is being backed up once every 24 hours. As soon as I solve the most pressing problems with my newly-flashed 3.5.3 I will start contributing as well.

z.

13

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Cannot Create Symlink

« on: May 05, 2005, 08:25:21 am »

Misiurei: you will probably benefit by setting up multiple partitions on your SD card. Instructions are at https://www.oesf.org/index.php?title=Multip..._a_CF_/_SD_card. Keep the first partition as VFAT and set up a second one as ext2. Then make sure you install packages to the second partition (edit /etc/ipkg.conf accordingly).

z.

14

OpenZaurus/Opie/Qtopia / How Do I Split Oe Packages Into Feeds?

« on: April 29, 2005, 03:57:46 am »

splitfeeds is a python script that splits the ipk's by inspecting the major SECTION.

That would explain why there are separate "net", "network" and "networking" feeds  And the "e" feed is also quite charming...

z.

15

Software / Zaurus Port Of Treeline

« on: April 28, 2005, 05:25:37 am »

Yes, there are several outliners on Handango, most of them quite good as far as I know. Certainly, people who want a polished outliner now should go with one of them. I'm just having fun dabbling in Python, that's all :-)

z.