Messages

1

5x00 Hardware / Custom battery pack

« on: November 03, 2004, 06:25:02 pm »

Z not turning on without bettery: Id guess that the 3rd terminal on the sharp battery is used to talk to a battery monitoring chip or perhaps a thermistor. Has anyone got a dead battery that they could take to peices and have a look at? Perhaps you could end up taking the actual battery out of the plastic case and just having whatever is connected to the 3rd terminal left in it,with the bigger batteries hooked up outside.

I might have to see if allelectronics will ship to the UK, thats a good price...

2

5x00 Hardware / Custom battery pack

« on: November 02, 2004, 11:50:20 am »

Interesting stuff, but theres something you may want to think about with adding extra batteries. If you have the 3 batteries all connected in parallel then as they run down the two higher capacity ones are going to discharge differently to the 900mah sharp battery, possibly even discharging through the smaller battery.

Id guess that after a while you will find that the two li-polymer batteries will have a similar capacity to the sharp battery. The problem with having batteries in parallel like this is that when one of them fails it brings down the other with it - this can be a 'bad thing' especially with lithium based batteries which can burn up if treated improperly.

Have you tried just using the two li-polymer packs without the sharp battery? The battery on my 5500 is pretty weak and after reading this thread I might consider replacing it with some of these if the zaurus will work without the sharp battery in it.

3

5x00 General discussions / Some newbie questions, help please!

« on: November 02, 2004, 09:32:51 am »

Thanks for the replies..

* How do I change the background picture, the little dragon is quite cute, but id rather have something less intrusive?

Launcher

Found it under settings > launcher > tabs > all tabs > edit. Unfortunately I seem to only be able to select a solid colour, other selections are ignored when I click apply. Thats OK though, at least the background is a bit (lot :) less busy now.

* I have installed the Openzaurus 3.5.1 64/0 image with a kingston 256mb sd card as root. While doing this I had to put in a nameserver address, ive set this up for my network at home, but if I go somewhere else, am I going to have to change this manually?

I thought you could have more than one listed in the file in /etc (whatever it's called - resolv.conf ??)

Yep, thats easily done, but how do I handle situations where I dont know what the nameserver is going to be (random wireless hotspots etc)?

* I have an Ambicom WL1100C wireless cf card, it works fine except for when the zaurus suspends in battery mode - it just hangs instead, no response to anything, have to use the switch on the back to reboot. How can i stop this?

No idea, see whether this has been reported on the bugtracker and mailing list.

I havent found it so far, theres a few posts that look similar, but no answers to them. Ill keep looking.

* The bottom line of the screen always seems to be corrupt, or not cleared properly. This happens on the bottom of screen in either rotation. Is this normal?

Yes; I think this is kernel related, but it doesn't do any harm.

Si

All right, as long as its not broken. Although some things look OK, like opie terminal in full screen mode.

Jcroto1: useful info about opera

Thats great, ive got opera 7.3 installed now with buttons and everything!

---------------------------------

So I still need to sort out:

*Hang on suspend

*Being able to 'eject mmc/sd card'

*nameservers

*Multiple mounts of /dev/mmcda1
I just thought of some stuff on this:

Code: [Select]

in fstab:
/dev/mtdblock4  /mnt/root  jffs2
/dev/mmcda1  /  ext2which sort of corresponds to

Code: [Select]

output of mount:
/dev/mmcda1 on /mnt/root type jffs2
/dev/mmcda1 on / type ext2
So is this just mount not knowing the difference between mmcda1 and mtdblock4?

Also, would it be worth adding a sync option to the SD card mount?

4

5x00 General discussions / Some newbie questions, help please!

« on: November 01, 2004, 06:01:56 pm »

I have recently aquired a SL5500 with the intention of using it for a moving map/gps setup. Im in the process of re-installing it from scratch and have come across a few problems which I could use some help with:

* I have installed the Openzaurus 3.5.1 64/0 image with a kingston 256mb sd card as root. While doing this I had to put in a nameserver address, ive set this up for my network at home, but if I go somewhere else, am I going to have to change this manually?

* I have an Ambicom WL1100C wireless cf card, it works fine except for when the zaurus suspends in battery mode - it just hangs instead, no response to anything, have to use the switch on the back to reboot. How can i stop this?

* The bottom line of the screen always seems to be corrupt, or not cleared properly. This happens on the bottom of screen in either rotation. Is this normal?

* Ive installed Opera 6 with the 'runcompat' patch and it runs OK, except that the graphics for the buttons are missing. Anyone else tried this or had any problems with it?

* As I have the root on the SD card, is there a way of stopping the system seeing it as a removable drive? Also why does it seem to be mounted twice, once as about 15mb and once as the full capacity?

* How do I change the background picture, the little dragon is quite cute, but id rather have something less intrusive?

..That was quite a few questions! If anyone can help Id be really greatfull.