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Sharp PC-Z1 NetWalker / Any Netwalker Pc-z1 Users Still Out There?!? (nov 2016)

« on: November 22, 2016, 08:17:32 am »

Hi Varti
With a lot of help from Alex (who made Sunvox) I managed to get Sunvox running on the Netwalker, so I'm a happy man. There's still a lot of things about the Ubuntu OS that bug me, but with the LXDE desktop things are a lot better. In time maybe I'll actually figure out how to compile a better OS for it.
Thanks for all your help!
Teamoth

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Sharp PC-Z1 NetWalker / Any Netwalker Pc-z1 Users Still Out There?!? (nov 2016)

« on: November 18, 2016, 08:21:22 am »

I've found out that someone has (at least) attempted to port ArchLinuxARM on the Netwalker:

https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=9663

You might want to ask him how far has the port progressed. A port like that is not for the faint-hearted, you might however ask for help to greguu here, he has done an ArchLinux ARM port for the Zaurus.

Varti

Hi Varti

I've improved things quite a bit by installing the LXDE desktop environment by running 'sudo apt-get install lxde'. There's information about it here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LXDE
Running LXDE seems to have made things a lot smoother and faster and I don't have the problem of it trying to load up Firefox and Thunderbird when I don't want it to and it's not dropping key strokes and mouse like it was. I've had to install a separate program to deal with wifi (I'm using Wicd Manager and it works well) as I couldn't find any wifi settings, and I have to launch gnome-power-manager manually each time I restart, but that's no biggy and I usually just suspend it rather than shut it down. There's probably some script I can write to make it run on start-up if I spend more time on that. But all in all, it's running much better now.

Work is still ongoing to see if Sunvox will work and so I'm bothering people on the Sunvox forum about that: http://www.warmplace.ru/forum/viewtopic.ph...;p=14564#p14564. Fingers crossed...

Cheers, Teamoth

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Sharp PC-Z1 NetWalker / Any Netwalker Pc-z1 Users Still Out There?!? (nov 2016)

« on: November 17, 2016, 05:55:09 am »

Just wondering if anyone's got an easy to install lightweight distro running on their Netwalker that they can share?

The stock Ubuntu 9.04 is really slow, to the extent that the keyboard and mouse won't work for periods of time (this is the same with an external keyboard and mouse). I have reset the stock Ubuntu 9.04 using the instructions on this page in the forum: https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=27365 (with some good help from Admin person Varti!), but it hasn't fixed the problem of how slow it is. If there was a way to install a lighter desktop environment I'm sure it would help. Although I'm really knowledgeable on Windows my Linux understanding sucks and most of the generic Ubuntu advice I have learned online does not seem to work with this weird Sharp-Flavoured-Arm version of Ubuntu 9.04.

One issue I have with it is that when it wakes from suspend it spends a while flashing up a plain white window in the middle of the screen with the words 'start-up now' and then loads up multiple instances of Firefox and tries to load Thunderbird (which I uninstalled as I don't need it). While this is all going on it is completely unusable and sometimes I have to just do a force shut-down by holding the power button down. So I've looked online at advice on this, but all the places I'm supposed to look inside Ubuntu do not contain these start up entries.

I bought the Netwalker in the hope of eventually being able to run a lightweight audio tracker program I like, as I find a portable device with a keyboard much better for this task than a normal touchscreen phone/tablet.

If you've seen Netwalker activity elsewhere online, or if you think I should be bothering another community, please let me know.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Teamoth

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Sharp PC-Z1 NetWalker / How To: Restore Your Netwalker Pc-z1

« on: November 10, 2016, 05:50:51 am »

Hi Varti, I've seen the thread over on the Sunvox forum now about a Zaurus port and your post. Yeah if Alex does release a Zaurus port that might be a good option for the Netwalker if I can't get one of the existing versions to work. I've heard Milky Tracker mentioned many times, but I've not played with it yet.

Netwalker-wise everything has ground to a halt until I can find more time to figure out how to compile a nice lightweight Linux Kernel image that will work better on it. It's a shame that the Netwalker wasn't more widely distributed, as there'd probably be more people sharing image files out there.

So the jury is still out as to whether the Netwalker is going to be my new pocket Sunvox computer... I may end up selling it and looking for a simpler more immediate solution that doesn’t require so much head scratching.

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Sharp PC-Z1 NetWalker / How To: Restore Your Netwalker Pc-z1

« on: November 06, 2016, 08:56:04 am »

Now to try and get Sunvox working, which involves me hassling people on another forum...

I have never tried Sunvox, but it looks like an interesting tracker! Coincidentally, some other user here has already asked for a port of Sunvox on warmplace.ru for the Zaurus, which is basically Netwalker's predecessor, I'd love to see that port too.

Varti

Sunvox is simply my favourite bit of software ever. I've been using it regularly since 2009 on many platforms (Palm OS, Windows, Winmobile/CE, Android, iOS...). My favourite portable device was a Jornada 720, as having a physical qwerty keyboard allows you to play the keys kinda like piano keys! Great for making up little tunes/loops when on public transport etc. I loved the immediateness of the embedded WinMo/CE flavour software it ran (no waiting for start up), but in the end it was just too underpowered and I've been on a quest for a more recent replacement for sometime. As much as I'm enjoying the Netwalker I've not yet got Sunvox working on it and the Ubuntu it's running is really, really slow. If the Netwalker is to become the Jornada 720 replacement I'm going to have to learn about compiling Linux images and put a much lighter OS on it and it's finding the time at the moment!

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Sharp PC-Z1 NetWalker / How To: Restore Your Netwalker Pc-z1

« on: November 04, 2016, 05:23:18 am »

Correction, wifi is now working! The problem was just my own buffoonery. Now to try and get Sunvox working, which involves me hassling people on another forum...

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Sharp PC-Z1 NetWalker / How To: Restore Your Netwalker Pc-z1

« on: November 03, 2016, 06:11:40 pm »

Brilliant! Thank you, I'll start downloading that now!

Hi, any luck in recovering your Netwalker? Just curious...

Varti

Hi Varti, yes I have had some luck just this evening! I'd been trying on and off when I got a chance (we've got a 3 week old baby!) and so far it hadn't worked until this evening. The problem was with using dd terminal commands to put the image file on the microsd. I must of tried it a dozen times and looked at a dozen dd command webpages for advice, but the image that would be copied to the sd card never worked when I booted. This evening I tried some software called Etcher (https://etcher.io/) to put the image on the sd and this time it worked when I booted the Netwalker. So I've finally managed to restore it, which is great. Looks like there may be some other issue with the wifi not working, but thankfully web usage wasn't my reason for getting it. Thanks again for your help on this!

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Sharp PC-Z1 NetWalker / How To: Restore Your Netwalker Pc-z1

« on: October 28, 2016, 10:11:08 am »

Hi and welcome!

I never had a NetWalker; luckily, archive.org seems to have the restore pack archived:

https://web.archive.org/web/20131001003044/...9/netwalker.img

Beware, it's quite a huge file (3.7G), since it's on archive.org the download will most probably take a while.

Varti

Brilliant! Thank you, I'll start downloading that now!

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Sharp PC-Z1 NetWalker / How To: Restore Your Netwalker Pc-z1

« on: October 28, 2016, 09:56:06 am »

Hello there, I recently picked up a PC-Z1 and am hoping that there is still some way for me to reset/reinstall the OS on it. I understand that this is rather old tech nowadays and that the posts here are some years old...

The Netwalker I bought takes 2 minutes to start up (as opposed to the 3 second startup I've seen online!) and the wifi does not seem to work. It can't see any wifi networks that are normally available to me.

I bought the Netwalker to run a particular bit of lightweight software on when travelling to and from work (as opposed to web browsing/watching videos) but ideally I'd like to try and fix the wifi and get back the snappy 3 second start up.

The link to the Netwalker restore pack at the top of this thread no longer seems to be working, but maybe someone still has a copy?

Any help you can give would be very much appreciated.

Many thanks

Tim