Messages

1

C1000/3x00 Hardware / Pivot Head Wobblyness

« on: October 16, 2008, 07:33:12 am »

First thing to do would be to make sure that all external screws are tight enough (not *too* tight!). If you put the zaurus in "laptop mode" then turn the screen 90 degrees from there you can see two screws on the hinge. Tighten those if they need it.

2

Debian / Nokia's Os2008 On Zaurus Or Chroot Under Debian

« on: August 02, 2008, 10:58:32 pm »

OS2008 is just Linux + X11 + panels + hildon apps. The most interesting part of that I think is the apps themselves. In that cast, getting specific hildon apps running under Debian might be the best way to go about it. The hildon libs are already there and if you have the source it shouldn't be too difficult, just a matter of repackaging. As for binary compatibility: The PXA255 and PXA270 Zauruses are an armv5te and the N8x0 is an armv6tje w/ VFP. They can both run baseline EABI binaries (which is what Debian is compiled as) but if you compile an app for the N8x0 that uses the N8x0's VFP (vector floating point) it won't work on the Zaurus since the Zaurus doesn't have one. Anything that's EABI with softfloat should be fine I would think. Still, most of the interesting stuff is open source.

-John

3

Debian / Why Is Debian Slow?

« on: May 14, 2008, 08:41:52 am »

Cross compiling will be harder than native compiling. Someone apparently did ubuntu builds specifically targetting different ARM processors ( mojo.handhelds.org ), but they used a build farm of ARM machines, IIRC and/or qemu-arm-system on x86 machines. qemu is an option for you, but you'll probably end up with slower compiles than on a real zaurus. That being said, profiling certain programs and/or libraries and recompiling them with fewer options or CPU optimizations might make a big difference in some cases.

4

Debian / Setting Up Wifi With Wpa

« on: May 13, 2008, 04:52:29 am »

If you dual boot, just chroot into your debian install from pdaxrom or angstrom, and apt-get install whatever you need.
For wpa I use the following setup in /etc/network/interfaces:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
        wpa-ssid My-network
        wpa-psk my-long-psk-for-my-network

5

Debian / Why Is Debian Slow?

« on: May 13, 2008, 04:49:15 am »

A couple differences I can think of (off the top of my head) that might affect this:
-CPU specific gcc optimizations in Angstrom vs standard lowest common denominator Armv4t optimizations in Debian
-Angstrom often builds things without options that aren't typically used on a handheld, where Debian typically includes all options
-Lots of fine tuning to reduce memory usage, such as reducing the number of services run by default
-ash/busybox vs bash/coreutils

Overall, this is why for day-to-day stuff I boot angstrom from SD and for when I *need* something from Debian I boot it from a usb-stick.

6

Debian / Can't Untar Armel-root-fs.tar.bz2

« on: February 09, 2008, 11:37:58 pm »

If you have a cardreader you could try untar'ing it on a desktop Linux box...

7

Debian / Debian On A Sl-5500

« on: February 06, 2008, 07:57:21 pm »

@Charlie: Try the latest altboot installkit tgz from 06-feb, right near the top of the page. Remember to rename zImage.bin to zImage. It still freezes midway through boot but I can use altboot to let me get a shell. I will poke around and post my results.

Update: apparently ipkg-cl configure fails on boot. I'm not sure if this is enough to make it not boot or if there is another issue. trying to ipkg install foo.ipk results in a segmentation fault as well. No ideas right now.

-John

8

C1000/3x00 General discussions / 32mb Ramfs On C3000

« on: January 30, 2008, 03:13:25 am »

If you run df -h and it shows the tmpfs has 60KB of files stored on it then 60KB of RAM is taken up. Also if you use swap, the contents of the tmpfs can be swapped as well (when needed).

9

C1000/3x00 General discussions / 32mb Ramfs On C3000

« on: January 29, 2008, 07:53:13 pm »

This is a much more flexible "ramdisk" than the one that was enabled on the Sharp ROM (and some OZ releases) for the 5500. This newer type of "ramdisk" (tmpfs) only takes up as much RAM as whatever is stored on it. It helps performance and makes your flash live longer to have /tmp and /dev be stored in RAM.

10

Debian / Debian On A Sl-5500

« on: January 24, 2008, 08:25:01 pm »

Find a file that ends in jffs2 and matches the time of the kernel build.  Rename foo-bar.rootfs.jffs2 to initrd.bin.

11

Android / Google Android Installable Image Available!

« on: January 14, 2008, 03:18:51 am »

When I had it working on my C1000 zaurus I was running it off of an ext3 formatted USB stick.

12

Android / Google Android Installable Image Available!

« on: January 10, 2008, 06:35:27 pm »

I got it running on my C1000 last night. I used an Angstrom 2.6.23 kernel that I applied the patch at http://androidzaurus.seesaa.net/ to. Then I grabbed the android.tgz.part?.rar from http://yonggun.tistory.com/ and followed the instructions for running it. The first time I started it I got nothing but the "Cylon eye" but after rebooting it started no problem the next time. The touchscreen seems to work inconsistently and when android is oriented "portrait" style the touchscreen still acts like landscape.

13

C1000/3x00 General discussions / C1000 As A Ir Remote

« on: December 06, 2007, 10:33:53 pm »

I stand corrected!  

14

C1000/3x00 General discussions / C1000 As A Ir Remote

« on: December 02, 2007, 05:41:46 pm »

If I understand the situation correctly, no it's not possible. On the SL-5500 you could actually get access to the IR transmitter in a sort of "raw" mode, allowing you to actually turn it on and off manually in a way that made it behave like a TV remote. On the SL-Cxx00 hardware, even the kernel can only address it as a serial port. If I'm wrong or if the situation has changed (since 2005 or so, when I last looked at this), I would love to hear about it.

-John

15

Off Topic forum / Installed Ubuntu On Desktop, Slow As Molasses In January

« on: October 31, 2007, 08:15:09 pm »

Another vote for Xubuntu. I still absolutely insist on Debian-stable for servers but for desktops/workstations I'm sold on Ubuntu/Xubuntu. I have Xubuntu on a 2GHz P4M (clocked at 1.2GHz for heat reasons :/) with 512MB RAM. I recently tried Debian again on a spare partition, but I had forgotten how much stuff Xubuntu had configured automagically on this laptop (for example, the multimedia keys, the power saving, the wireless, X11).