Messages

1

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Debian And Uboot

« on: April 20, 2007, 02:02:37 pm »

It is however lacking many packages that are on pdaxrom already, xfce was broken and couldnt find firefox/iceweasel, abiword or many others. Then again, icewm + lots of console programs work wonderfully - just not as many packages as pocketworkstation.

There are 9000 packages in the armel feed, which seems to have been an initial test, e.g., the log says that firefox 1.5 failed simply because the source was not found.

Definitely interested in how to boot this on the Z though and how to get access to more packages if anyone has any other armel mirrors for debian.
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The developer postings refer to some existing toolchains and feeds, including a toolchain and some packages built and online at OE/Angstrom.

EABI has been around a while, but there seems to have been a burst of activity lately. Someone with a better understanding of the technical details can perhaps give us an idea how useful this could be for the Z community.

2

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Debian And Uboot

« on: April 20, 2007, 10:54:56 am »

A lot of questions
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Thanks for a lot of answers, and very encouraging answers, too. So here's a couple more. . . .    

Which Z are you running it on? Do you know of any limitations relevant to the Cxx00, C7X0/860, 6000 or 5xxx series?

If someone can post basic installation and customization instructions, I expect a good many here would give this a try and then post further customizations, compile missing packages, and so forth. Someone here would likely be willing to host a feed and other files and links related to the project.

3

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Debian And Uboot

« on: April 19, 2007, 10:13:33 am »

I use Debian with u-boot on Zaurus.

Pocketworkstation was an excellent piece of work but ultimately didn't quite make for everyday use on the Zaurus for me. How well does this Arm EABI Debian work? Is it as fast as other 2.6 kernel distributions on the Zaurus or does running off the SD diminish the benefits? Are there customizations for the Zaurus keyboard, display, touchscreen available? Do the packages usually load and run reliably with apt-get like we are used to on the i386? Presumably, default screen size and dialog boxes beyond the edge of the screen are common? Is recompilation with Zaurus customization necessary? Desirable? Feasible?

The ultimate question is whether this Debian distribution plus some "Meanie-style" customizations to the Zaurus might be a shorter route to a laptop-style distribution on the Zaurus with an instant broad range of applications than the other efforts currently underway.

Thanks for the information and links.

4

Security and Networking / Evdo Anyone?

« on: April 16, 2007, 06:10:53 pm »

It's supposed to work in Linux. They say with a little editing and loading a standard module or two the device is recognized as a serial modem and you can dial with a regular ppp dialer. The Verizon software is unnecessary.

Use on the Zaurus may be less than optimal, however, because the USB720 uses a good bit of juice grabbing weak signals and some laptops can't keep it powered with a single USB port. So the device reportedly comes with a Y-cable so you can plug it into two ports and sufficient power. That's one more port than any Zaurus has. Perhaps a battery powered USB hub could do the trick, but quick access and convenience will suffer.

Check these sites and search for USB720 for details. There is probably more information available for some of the earlier USB devices which may be applicable to the USB720.

Howard Forums
Evdo-Coverage
EvdoInfo

Any news of actual experience -- particularly whether it works well enough to be worth it -- would be of interest to me as well.

edit:  oops, I see you were asking about the Sprint rather than the Verizon version, but the forums seem to think they work the same. I believe it's the same or similar hardware underneath.

5

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Does Fluxbox Have A Full-screen Option?

« on: February 14, 2007, 11:28:52 am »

Goggled it, found this, haven't tried it yet.

Re: [newbie!] full-screen apps?
From: Valter Toffolo <valtert@gm...> - 2005-05-31 22:10
2005/4/25, Mathias Gumz <mathias.gumz@gm...>:
> hi
>
> > Is it possible to run a program in full screen mode? I don"t mean maximized,
> > but instead I am talking about having the window contents occupy the entire
> > screen. Can fluxbox do this? I couldn"t find an option to enable this sort
> > of behavior.
>
> yes. the related action for the keys-file is called "Fullscreen", i ve
> something like:
>
> Mod4 f :Fullscreen
>
> in my .fluxbox/keys
>
> cheers, mathias
> --
> <name> mathias gumz <mail> akira at fluxbox dot org <pgp> 1024D/F6F6B18C
> <www> http://www.darkshed.net/ <irc> ak|ra (#fluxbox at freenode.org)

6

Software / Serving Wikipedia Locally On The Z

« on: October 30, 2006, 11:37:23 pm »

The wiki2zaurus homepage hasn't been updated in a long time and the latest downloadable version there of the converted wikipedia is quite old. From what I read about changes in format in the wikipedia, it seemed that the old perl scripts would need a good bit of work to process the current wiki files but I could be wrong. Searching wiki2zaurus on this forum gives a couple of recent threads that suggest someone may be working on this or another approach.

7

Software / Serving Wikipedia Locally On The Z

« on: October 29, 2006, 05:43:15 pm »

I would be interested in this also, and believe Meanie said at one point that he was working on this. Perhaps one day soon he will surprise us with a post.  

Rather than running mediawiki, apache, etc, there is an alternative approach that sounded appealling at first -- converting the data files to compressed html files that could be browsed directly. However, after a little investigation, it seems that there is so much variation in file format and loss of functionality involved that it did not work very well, and the conversion programs I saw didn't seem to be actively maintained.

8

OpenBSD / Sd And Sdio Support Coming Into Openbsd

« on: October 11, 2006, 11:23:55 pm »

Why do I have the feeling that the Sony VGN-UX90PS will never fully support OpenBSD? haha christ we haven't even got everything on the Z working.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Vaio UX runs the free VMWare Player and Server very well. Put the virtual machine on a 4GB memory stick, network to the hard disk for more storage, run it full screen, and you've got a snappy Linux handheld laptop -- without install/driver hassles and dead hardware. Power management, suspend/resume, magnifier button and so forth continue in the background in XP.

Installing VMware tools (mainly to get faster graphics) in some unsupported distributions isn't documented and can be a hassle, as directory structure varies and it is very picky about how it is compiled. But there are a couple dozen community virtual machines now that come with VMware tools already installed, so you can just download the configurations files and virtual disk and then apt-get to update. No install needed. Fedora, OpenSUSE, DSL and various Ubuntu variants all run well. There are OpenBSD and FreeBSD virtual machines available, but I haven't tried them.

Xubuntu seems the best compromise of features and performance to me so far, actually not much of a compromise at all (if you can stand knowing that XP is lurking beneath).

9

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / The End Of Ewi546 Is Coming

« on: October 02, 2006, 01:18:59 am »

The Linux Mirror Project or LinuxTracker might be able to handle most of the surge of new releases, leaving the others above to handle the day to day volume. This would work to the extent that people could use a torrent client.

10

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Pdaxrom 1.1.0beta 4 And New Bootloader

« on: August 09, 2006, 10:40:08 pm »

Is there any chance the new CXX0 stuff makes it to the CXX00 in the foreseeable future?

I wonder whether there is anything new in recent CXX0 beta4. Perhaps it is simply the Cxx00 beta4 finally working for Cxx0? I asked in the Cxx0 beta4 thread and got no answer. Is there a changelog somewhere? I'd be interested if anyone has any information.

11

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Pdaxrom 1.1.0beta 4 And New Bootloader

« on: August 07, 2006, 08:15:49 pm »

Just to play safe, is [3] the option for installing to internal flash (= HD)?

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I read the instructions to mean that doing nothing (no options) installs to the internal flash on the 7** and 860. Anyone know if that's right? I'm also interested if anyone has tried this new beta4 and could report how usable it is compared to beta1. Is it the same as the beta4 for the 1000 or have any of the glitches noted there been fixed in this later version of beta4?

12

Software / Outliner / Journal Application For Z / Linux

« on: August 07, 2006, 05:07:37 pm »

Leo is a python app with XML file format, a "general data management environment" more for programmers out of the box but many powerful features to adapt to other uses. Perhaps too many and too powerful features for someoone looking just for an outliner though.

13

Software / Gentoo/zaurus

« on: July 14, 2006, 02:13:27 pm »

The Gentoo/Zaurus project webpage is still there. Nothing further in a couple of years, but they say they plan to get back to it when their business permits. So don't buy their stuff. . . .  

14

C1000/3x00 General discussions / Motorola Razr V3 Via Usb

« on: June 25, 2006, 02:01:54 pm »

This is very phone-model-and-carrier-specific, as phone features are intentionally disabled by many carriers. I found www.howardforums.com the best place to get information on my phone's capabilities, necessary phone setup, carrier policies, and so forth. Once you've determined what the phone can do and configured it, the how-to's and people on this forum will be helpful for configuring the Zaurus to access it.

15

Site Suggestions, Requests, and Updates / Dawg Don't Hunt

« on: June 17, 2006, 11:55:45 am »

Miami Bob... Do you realized how many times you posted the same topic....

Please... refrain from the "Add Topic" button until you get the issue resolved...
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Looks like there is a major problem with the board then because, from my browser end, the message NEVER posted successfully at all. And I have been using the same Opera since I started on the board.

Both posting & searching, the browser communicated initially with the site & then just sat with the seconds timer running at the same post or search page for as long as I waited.

Maybe someone should check why the system is not responding properly?
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See the "Is the site server dying?" thread in the Site Suggestions forum. They are working on it and a move is planned.