Messages

1

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Taskbar Clipboard Utility For Next Release?

« on: March 20, 2007, 02:38:41 am »

You can use the standard X copy & paste by highlighting text in any window and then middle-clicking to paste it into another.  To middle-click you hold down whatever key you set to be the middle-click modifier key in the Input configuration app (e.g. Fn).

I use this all the time to copy & paste between the console, Emacs, Dillo, etc.

I can't remember exactly what that clipboard applet did in the Sharp ROM but if it's anything like the clipboard applets in KDE and Gnome then it should be very easy for someone to compile a package of a suitable one for pdaX.  There's no need to wait for the next release to get this kind of feature.

2

Zaurus - pdaXrom / R121: Something Odd With Filesystem Usage

« on: January 05, 2007, 06:51:36 pm »

The JFFS2 filesystem used for the internal flash root has built in compression.  So df displays the amount of space taken up by the compressed data and du displays the amount of uncompressed data.

3

Zaurus - pdaXrom / New Packages Announcement

« on: January 05, 2007, 08:01:07 am »

Great work ZDevil!  Your latest batch of packages have inspired me to finally release a game I patched and packaged up a number of months ago but never got around to posting:

Anyone remember that old game from 1992, Flashback?

It used to be my favourite game back in the day and I was thinking one day that it would be cool to get it to run under dosbox.  Thankfully some nice chap has rewritten a portable SDL version of the engine that powers the game.  So no need for emulators, the game runs at full speed on the Zaurus!

REminiscence is a Free implementation of Delphine Software's Flashback engine and is capable of running any game based on the Flashback engine.

This version has been patched to compile for pdaXrom and run fullscreen.

To play Flashback you'll need to get the original Flashback game data files as these are not Free Software.

IMPORTANT: This package DOES NOT contain the data files required to run the game.  See /usr/share/doc/reminiscence/README.pdaXrom for more information.

The game is now labelled as "abandonware" and is available for download from a variety of web sites.  Please note that it is NOT Free Software so you might be breaking the law if you acquire it in this manner.

See the attached screenshots which were taken on my Zaurus.

The package is also available from my unstable feed.

REminiscence also supports playing music in the game by using the MOD music files from the original Amiga version of the game.  The MOD files can be downloaded from Unexotica (see link below).  Simply place the MOD files (e.g. mod.flashback-ascenseur) in the same directory as the data files (i.e. /usr/lib/reminiscence/flashback).

http://www.exotica.org.uk/tunes/unexotica/.../Flashback.html

The MOD files are provided in an LHA archive.  Please let me know if you have trouble extracting these files and I will make them available in a more modern archive format.

Please note that there are some minor glitches in the cutscenes (objects compressing horizontally to a single pixel).  This has been apparently fixed in the unreleased version 0.1.9 of REminiscence.  I will be contacting the author to see if this patch can be released.

Cheers!

Matt

4

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Graphical Login For Pdaxrom

« on: September 07, 2006, 05:21:39 am »

I haven't tried GDM yet but I like the idea of a GUI login screen for pdaXrom.  Good work so far Chero!

A couple of thoughts/ideas:

1. To get to the text console you should just be able to switch virtual terminals, e.g. execute "chvt 1".  To get back to X use Fn-rightarrow.

(However I just tested his on beta1 and when I tried to switch back to X it just hung and when I ssh'd into my Zaurus and ran "chvt 1" it caused X to crash but the screen contents didn't change until I ran "startx" again.  I assume this is a bug in TinyX.)

2. My personal opinion is that starting the display manager from inittab is ugly and hard to manage.  I prefer the method I first saw in Debian where the DM is just started from a normal init script.  This makes it way easier to start and stop the DM and you don't have to edit inittab or muck around with runlevels just to disable X on boot.

Just my 2c.

Matt

5

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Recovering From Pdaxrom Shutdown -h

« on: March 26, 2006, 04:41:38 am »

Try "apm -s".

6

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Automatically Determining Dependancies

« on: March 26, 2006, 02:42:43 am »

A lot of people don't list dependencies at all or only list the ones they can think of.  I used to do it manually using ldd and "ipkg search <lib.so>".  I don't know if the pdaXrom builder scripts do anything clever to calculate the dependencies or if they are entered manually in the ipkg control file.  It's common practise (in Debian, BitBake, etc) to calculate them dynamically when the package is built.

7

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Automatically Determining Dependancies

« on: March 25, 2006, 11:02:45 pm »

I didn't notice that Armagon had already solved this but I whipped up a quick shell script to list the dependencies for any given binary.

The script was originally a one-liner so it's a tad ugly and crude but it works.  It uses ldd to find the list of required libraries so I'm not sure how this compares to objdump.  It also requires the /usr/lib/ipkg/info/* files so will need to be run on your Zaurus or this could be changed to read a feed file list.

The list of dependencies is pruned to be as compact as possible by removing any packages that are already covered by others.  For example if your binary uses Zlib and SDL then only "sdl" will be listed as SDL depends on xfree and xfree depends on libz.  I have also hardcoded it to remove glibc and libgcc from the depends list as they are provided with the base install of pdaXrom.

Code: [Select]

#!/bin/sh

BINARY=$1

if [ -z "$BINARY" ]; then
    echo "Usage: $(basename $0) [package to ignore...]"
    exit 1
fi

shift

IGNORE="glibc libgcc $*"

PKGS=$(for file in $(for lib in $(ldd $BINARY | awk '{ print($3) }'); do grep -l "^${lib}$" /usr/lib/ipkg/info/*; done | sort | uniq); do basename $file | sed 's/.list$//'; done)

IGNORE="$IGNORE $(for pkg in $(echo $PKGS | tr ' ' '\n'); do ipkg info $pkg Depends | cut -f2- -d\ | grep -v ^Depends | sed 's/, /\n/g' | sort | uniq; done)"

DEPENDS=$(echo $PKGS | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -v $(for pkg in $(echo $IGNORE | tr ' ' '\n'); do echo "-e $pkg "; done))

echo $DEPENDS | sed 's/ /, /g'

8

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Recovering From Pdaxrom Shutdown -h

« on: March 22, 2006, 10:27:57 pm »

Bigtime bump here.. but just letting you know.

I just ran into this problem with my C1000.
Latest build of pdaxrom, just installed last night.
I ran a shutdown -h now this morning, came back from work and the thing was dead as a doornail. I didn't have to short anything though, I just had to remove the battery for a little bit and throw it back in..

Did I miss something here? Is the on/off switch a softbutton, and does the Z stop listening when it's completely halted? Hmm, who can shed some light here?
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=119833\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Yes that's right, this has nothing to do with pdaXrom, it's just a "feature" of the Zaurus hardware.  If you can read Japanese you should find reference to it in the manual as it's obviously also an issue with the factory Sharp ROM.

9

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Address Book And Imap E-mail App

« on: February 03, 2006, 04:43:23 pm »

No the software I was talking about is called OfflineIMAP:

http://quux.org/devel/offlineimap/

"OfflineIMAP is a tool to simplify email reading. It allows you to read the same mailbox from multiple computers and ensures that your changes will be automatically reflected on all computers. You can use various mail clients to read a single box or read mail while offline with full synchronization when you reconnect. You can read IMAP mail with readers that lack IMAP support (same goes for SSL). OfflineIMAP's multithreaded synchronization algorithm performs between 10 and 60 times faster than many mail readers' internal IMAP support, and it can be used even with mail readers that support IMAP already. There are five available user interface modules, including scripted execution, an interactive terminal interface, and GUI interfaces."

The OfflineIMAP web site seems to be down at the moment but you can install it from my unstable feed.  My package works fine under 1.1.0beta1.

10

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Address Book And Imap E-mail App

« on: January 16, 2006, 02:19:31 pm »

I use Mutt and offlineimap to read my IMAP mailboxes.  Of course Mutt, being text-based, is incredibly fast but it obviously doesn't suit everyone's taste.  I would however recommend offlineimap to everyone who currently uses IMAP, if their mail client can support Maildir folders instead.  Offlineimap is a Python app that syncs your remote IMAP account with a local Maildir.  It's stable and fast and allows you to get around the deficiencies in a lot of mail clients that either don't support IMAP or support it poorly.

11

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Xmms, Jog Wheel, Sl-c1000\c3100

« on: September 13, 2005, 07:37:31 am »

Have you tried the Screen Blanker applet?  It should come with the default install of pdaXrom.  When in blanking mode it can control XMMS with play/pause (OK), stop (Cancel) and skip tracks (jog wheel).  If it doesn't work on the Cxx00 please let me know as the key codes may be different to the Cx00 series.

12

Zaurus - pdaXrom / What Feeds Are Out There?

« on: September 10, 2005, 08:25:15 am »

Throw an FAQ for making "feed" from set of files to me and I make http://justnews.ru/zaurus as feed.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=93611\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Here is the script I use:

Code: [Select]

#!/bin/sh
#

feed_dir=/mnt/card/feed

update () {

    echo "Updating $1:"
    
    if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
  echo "`basename $0`: update() called without directory argument!"
  exit 1
    else
  if [ ! -d $1 ]; then
      echo "`basename $0`: update() called on non-existant directory!"
      exit 1
  fi
    fi
    
    cd $1

    if ! echo *.ipk | grep -q '^\*'; then
  echo -n "Removing Packages..."
  rm -f Packages
  echo " done."

  for file in *.ipk; do
      echo -n "Adding $file..."
      tar xzOf $file ./control.tar.gz | tar xzOf - ./control | sed 's/ $//' >> Packages
      echo >> Packages
      echo " done."
  done
    else
      echo "No ipk files found."
      echo -n "Creating blank Packages file..."
      >Packages
      echo " done."
    fi

    echo
}

update $feed_dir
Make sure you change the "feed_dir" variable at the top to point to your feed directory.

13

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Gimp Please

« on: July 29, 2005, 09:55:15 am »

I had the same problem but it was fixed by installing the bzip2 package which includes libbz2.  The gimp ipk should have bzip2 in the "Depends" list but this has been missed by accident.

14

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Repo On Sd

« on: July 29, 2005, 09:43:47 am »

Hi Ben,

It's pretty easy to set up a local feed on an SD or CF card.  The steps go something like this:

1. First thing you need to do create a directory for your feed, e.g. /mnt/card/feed.

2. Add an IPK file or two to the feed directory to get started.

3. You'll need to create a Packages file for ipkg to load.  The Packages file contains the descriptions of all the IPKs in your feed.  The easiest way is to have one automatically built for you by a script.  See below for the script I use or download the attachment.  You'll need to run the script everytime you add a new IPK file.  If you're not using /mnt/card/feed as your directory make sure you edit the top line of the script first.

4. Open up the Package Manager and add a new feed with the URL pointing to the directory you just made, e.g. file:///mnt/card/feed.  Click the "Reload package list" icon and you should see your feed's packages in the list.  Everytime you add new packages, after running the update-local-feed script, you'll need to either click the reload button in the Package Manager or type 'ipkg update' in a terminal so that ipkg will reload your Packages file.

I hope this all makes sense.  Let me know if you need any more help.

Cheers,

Matt

/usr/local/bin/update-local-feed:

Code: [Select]

#!/bin/sh
#

feed_dir=/mnt/card/feed

update () {

    echo "Updating $1:"
    
    if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
  echo "`basename $0`: update() called without directory argument!"
  exit 1
    else
  if [ ! -d $1 ]; then
      echo "`basename $0`: update() called on non-existant directory!"
      exit 1
  fi
    fi
    
    cd $1

    if ! echo *.ipk | grep -q '^\*'; then
  echo -n "Removing Packages..."
  rm -f Packages
  echo " done."

  for file in *.ipk; do
      echo -n "Adding $file..."
      tar xzOf $file ./control.tar.gz | tar xzOf - ./control | sed 's/ $//' >> Packages
      echo >> Packages
      echo " done."
  done
    else
      echo "No ipk files found."
      echo -n "Creating blank Packages file..."
      >Packages
      echo " done."
    fi

    echo
}

update $feed_dir

15

Zaurus - pdaXrom / partitioning SD card

« on: July 27, 2005, 07:33:25 am »

Hi Phill,

Due to the way the standard /etc/sdcontrol works it's not trivial to get two partitions to mount automatically.  I've been meaning for a while to rewrite sdcontrol so that it supports things like this (as well as swap partitions and multiple SD cards with different partitioning schemes).

In the meantime you could try groq's modified version of sdcontrol.  It's based on the OZ version of sdcontrol so you might need to tweak it a bit to work on pdaXrom.  I haven't tried it so can't say whether it should work or not.

https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showt...indpost&p=66353

I'll post my version of sdcontrol if or when I get around to finishing it!

Matt