Messages

1

General Discussion / Sharp Is01: The Zaurus Is Back, Sort Of...

« on: August 01, 2011, 09:45:08 pm »

Did anyone get the Sharp IS01 and try it out first hand?  

Just curious what the hands on impressions were.

UPDATE: oops, just realized this thread is over a year old... but then again, still a valid question I guess....  hopefully the IS01 was upgradable from snapdragon to latest.

I doubt you can upgrade the snapdragon processor to something else. Most, if not all mobile devices are specially designed so they can be so small. It is a system-on-a-chip anyway.

I took a look at it while I was in Japan last year. It didn't really impress me that much. One cool thing is it IS a phone provided you use a bluetooth headset. I still want a larger screen if I am going to have a clamshell portable.

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C1000/3x00 Hardware / Smallest (physically) Cf Wifi Card Available?

« on: November 08, 2010, 04:09:47 pm »

It's gonna be hard. I don't think anyone makes CF wifi cards anymore. In my personal experience, every smaller CF wifi card I have had (3 of them) has died. I don't know why, they just start loosing connection and can be reconnected if I put pressure on them from underneath for a while and then eventually that doesn't even work.

The only places I can think to find them are places like ebay or some very unknown (untrusted) online vendors.

3

Android / Android T Mobile Phone Convert

« on: November 05, 2010, 08:50:02 pm »

you guys have the phone yet?

What "the phone" are you talking about?

My wife has an HTC hero. It's ok, but I can't stand trying to type on the touch screen. And lost phones have gone cheap and used capacitive touch screens which meant they don't work with a stylus or in very cold weather.

If I got a smart phone it would be Android but it would have to also have a physical keyboard (like the my touch slide). I wouldn't dare touch an iPhone appliance. With the amount of control Apple has over their products they should be paying ME to use them.

I'm also not sure about a few things Android does though. Can anyone explain any fixes for this? One issue I have is if I open a couple of programs and switch around to something else, it seems to auto close the other programs so when I go back to them they are "reset" and anything I was doing on them is lost. It seems I have far less control over things on Android than I do on the Zaurus or a PC.

I have kinda given up on getting a smart phone. There hasn't been one that would fulfill my requirements, though the N900 comes close but lacks usb host.

4

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Zaurus Kexecboot-enabled Kernels

« on: November 02, 2010, 10:02:32 pm »

Hi Xamindar,

I think you should take a break and chill out for a bit. You can't expect things to work seamlessly when they are not really aimed at Joe User. As soon as you reflash you are on the road to being a hacker...

Oh I'm chill. I just put my zaurus back to what it used to be and everything is fine.  I'm sorry I sound harsh. It is frustrating to have people post updates like this but leave out important information that is required to get it working.

Why don't you get on the mailing list and relate your experiences there ? I am sure they would appreciate feedback directly from a tester. (I don't know who user ant is IRL). http://lists.linuxtogo.org/pipermail/zaurus-devel/

I'm not sure they would. They seem to be expecting me to be running Angstrom. I have never been able to get it working, have you?

Documentation is always the last thing to get written. If you read the mailing list archives it looks like they just want feedback to see what works and what doesn't at this stage. Plenty of things seems to be not working.

We are talking at least a couple of notes or examples of what files it is looking for to boot. That is hardly time consuming documentation. Thanks for the mail archive tip, I'll scan through it some time for any information.

I think that what is on your flash is up to you, you don't need Sharp to supply new data. I expect though that your Sharp ROM is configured to be on flash so removing it is not an option. I am guessing that for some reason scanning jffs is slow; my understanding is that kexec is searching for bootable kernels. It would be nice if there was an option in one of the config files to disable scanning of flash.

Yeah, I just realized this topic is under the "Angstrom & Openzaurus" sub-category on the forums. Maybe he assumed I was running Angstrom. I honestly would be willing to give Angstrom another try but last time I did I had a hard time finding a way to install it onto an SD card and boot into it. But anyway, yes, it would be a very nice option to be able to disable the internal flash scan. I can't think of any reason someone would have a kernel on the internal flash for it to scan.

5

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Zaurus Kexecboot-enabled Kernels

« on: November 02, 2010, 04:13:46 pm »

GAH! Forget it. I copied the image.nfo file over to a boot.cfg file and now it doesn't even show my sharp rom listed anymore. Then I tried booting into the debian eabi install and the kernel hung at "failed to load initial console" or whatever.

You guys have absolutely no documentation so how can you expect anyone else to use this kernel without having to scour through your source code to find out what and how it needs the boot.cfg file set up? I'll take another look at this kernel if someone ever decides to document their work so others can use it. Until then, I'll stick with the Omegamoon kernel which works perfectly (despite scanning the nand very slowly as well) and even has a better looking menu (with this angstrom one you can't tell which is the selection, the darker one or the lighter one).

6

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Zaurus Kexecboot-enabled Kernels

« on: November 02, 2010, 03:41:21 pm »

Also, what size is the icon.xpm supposed to be?

7

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Zaurus Kexecboot-enabled Kernels

« on: November 02, 2010, 02:29:58 pm »

Purposedly, we try to hide everything to the user.
There is a kernel bootlogo and printk loglevel is set to 3.
Which information do you need from kexecboot micro-kernel?

Maybe I'm wrong but I figured most people who would know enough to be able to use this kernel would want to see the kernel output as well. I like to see what it is scanning so I know what it is doing. Occasionally I have had an SD card inserted that caused the kernel to "hang" until it was removed and seeing the kernel messages has helped in those situations. Besides, it's a lot better than having a huge Angstrom image displayed that has nothing to do with the zaurus. It might as well be a big MacDonalds logo.

About label, check your /boot/boot.cfg.

OK, so this must have changed. The old kexec kernel I used read the /boot/image.nfo file and got the label from there. Good to know the change. Thanks. Is it the same? A simple line stating the label?

Finally, about the logo, it all depends on the distro you're compiling but is purely cosmetic thing. Most distros are using standard OpenEmbedded logo (the OE one) but Angstrom has own.

OK, OE logo is fine, where can I get the kernel with that logo instead? I didn't see any alternative kernels listed.

P.S.
About slow nand scan, it takes almost 30 seconds for scanning *two* jffs2 in nand, so it is not that slow...
BUT, if you still have old 2.4 jffs2 images, this could take much longer.
Please be sure to properly erase the nand (flash_erase_all -j /dev/mtd[2:3]) and optionally flash *recent* jffs2 images.

From the moment I turn on the Zaurus, it is 2 minutes and 30 seconds before the menu shows up. To me, that is way too long. And to say I need to erase my NAND and flash new images is unacceptable. With the amount of customization I had to do to get everything working properly there is no way I would be able to get it working the same again without hours of work. Besides, what are these *recent* jffs2 images you talk about? As far as I know, Sharp stopped updating their ROMs. If the kexec kernel doesn't "like" the NAND then why is it scanning it? There are no kernel images on it anyway.

Thanks for the info. I'll give it a try again. One thing you didn't answer, why does it have to scan the NAND? Is it possible to get a kernel that doesn't even do that?

8

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Zaurus Kexecboot-enabled Kernels

« on: October 30, 2010, 04:33:41 pm »

Ok, I hope the person who made this kernel is reading this thread. Regarding the new gui - EWW! It displays in a huge splash "Angstrom" while hiding the kernel messages. I thought this was a kexec boot kernel, not an angstrom one. I don't even have Angstrom on my zaurus and as far as I can tell Angstrom has never been stable on the zaurus anyway.

Second issue, it still takes F.O.R.E.V.E.R to scan the internal flash. Please disable it or fix it.

Third issue, this new gui, once it has finally scanned and found the bootable kernels, does not show the name (label) of the selection like the old one did. Before I had a list that showed "Debian Eabi" and "Sharp JP rom". Now it just tells me on which partition it found the kernel. If I didn't already know which partition booted which OS from the previous kernel I would be guessing here. Not good for any new users of this kernel.

I'm going back to the previous, better kernel. Thanks for the continued work though, but I would like it to improve things instead of degrading.

9

General Discussion / Sharp Is01: The Zaurus Is Back, Sort Of...

« on: October 30, 2010, 04:14:38 pm »

I was in Japan last week and thought I was looking at this. Guess not. The one I saw was called a Lynx with model number SH-10B. It looks just like this but was upwards of $700. Would be really cool to have one though. The phone function is weird in that it will be only on speakerphone unless you have a bluetooth headset attached. Which is funny because Japanese don't like walking around with a bluetooth headset on at all.

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Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Zaurus Kexecboot-enabled Kernels

« on: October 30, 2010, 03:52:58 pm »

Great to see this is still being worked on. Did they do anything else besides a new GUI? Like fix the bugs that make it take 5 minutes to scan the internal flash? They should just disable the internal flash scan as it doesn't usually hold a kernel anyway.

By the way, which image do I use for a C3100? There is none for that model. I forget which one I used last time. I'm assuming spitz but not sure.

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C1000/3x00 General discussions / Video Playback On Your Cxx00

« on: October 17, 2010, 04:41:14 am »

Hi xamindar, can you post your mencoder script?  I have lots of tv shows recorded with MythTV that I would like to convert and take with me on my Zaurus.

So sorry I didn't reply to this. I read it then forgot about it. Here you go. It uses mencoder which is usually part of mplayer. Just make sure you have mencoder installed and you should be good.

One thing about it though. When I use it to encode HD content (very high resolution video) the framerate of the resulting video is a little strange. It drops frames on encode for some reason. Maybe there is a filter I can add or something but I haven't gotten around to it. Most resulting videos are great though.

just run the script like this:
zvidencoder.sh input output

It encodes with a width of 640 by default.

12

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Zaurus Kexecboot-enabled Kernels

« on: October 14, 2010, 09:05:29 pm »

SL-C1000 and newer models have also a 2.4 kernel.

Why multibooting with Cacko is possible with them ?

Because the kexec 2.6 kernel boots up the 2.4 kernel.

13

Software / Zocalo Web Feed Reader (sharp Rom)

« on: September 28, 2010, 06:13:18 am »

in the event of a crash or failed recovery, I can copy over the directory and maybe get lucky.

Jake

Tell me about it. I just got through changing all my passwords on all my important internet accounts and saving them in the kpassword manager on my zaurus a few days ago. I decided to reboot my zaurus yesterday and when it came up my background was back on default and none of my pim applications had any info in them anymore. Rebooted back into debian and ran an fsck on the hard drive and for some reason it was almost totally corrupted. It seems that every file that I modified in the past month was corrupted beyond use.

So now I have to hope most of those new passwords are saved in firefox on my pc. At least the email ones are so I should be able to use the reset services of my bank and such to get it fixed. But what a hassle, hours of organization deleted.

14

Software / Zocalo Web Feed Reader (sharp Rom)

« on: September 22, 2010, 05:33:01 am »

I think Zacolo is fine with the functionality it currently has. Jakfish is right that many sites' feeds have very short summaries but that is the fault of the website, not the program. Gizmodo comes to mind.

Thanks again Koan. One little thing I would like to mention. When I have it update all feeds and it gets to one that fails or times out, it will pop up a box asking if I want to continue or stop the update. While I do find it useful because I can stop the update if the cause is the loss of internet connectivity, it does require that I check it or watch it if I want it to be ready when I need to disconnect internet and head out. Is it possible to add a little timer to that pop-up box? Maybe like 5 or 10 seconds and then it will automatically select continue and finish updating? If not then no worries. I just have one feed that seems to update only 20% of the times I try and that pop-up stops it until I select はい.

Again, great program! It is stable and very useful.

15

C1000/3x00 General discussions / Video Playback On Your Cxx00

« on: September 15, 2010, 10:18:30 pm »

I bought a 2000MaH battery for 15USD shipped from ebay/Hong Kong.  I imagine it's shown up but for complicated reasons, I can't get to my mail until the end of the month.  The price was right, though, if the thing did ship.

Let me know how that battery turns out. I have seen it as well and there is also a website that sells them for $10 but probably a little more with shipping. I asked the ebay seller when these batteries were actually manufactured (because lithium-ion degrade even when not used). I did not receive a response so I took that to mean a bad thing and didn't bother buying any.

Probably better than my current situation though. My current battery (official Sharp 5600 battery) seems to last an hour or so, less if I watch a movie or connect to wireless. With the original C3100 battery my Zaurus will complain that the battery is dead and put its self to sleep as soon as I try to connect to a wireless access point.