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Messages - maxg

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1
General Discussion / Forget The Zaurus - Itś Fujitsu Time!
« on: September 13, 2007, 08:44:42 am »
As far as I know, suspend usually means suspend to RAM (i.e the ACPI S3 state, sometimes called "sleep"). Suspend to disk (i.e "hibernate") works fine on Windows ; however it is a lot slower because the system has to write the contents of the RAM to the disk. On the Fuji, there is 1 GB RAM, it takes 20 seconds to dump or load the RAM, which isn't too bad but still a lot more than the 1 second or so to resume a Zaurus from suspend.

2
General Discussion / Forget The Zaurus - Itś Fujitsu Time!
« on: September 12, 2007, 12:12:20 pm »
You're right. A suspended laptop will run out of battery pretty fast (maybe 15-20% per day, but it depends on many things, e.g how much RAM is plugged)

3
General Discussion / Forget The Zaurus - Itś Fujitsu Time!
« on: September 08, 2007, 07:30:56 pm »
I bought one of those U8240 a few weeks ago (thanks Google Summer of Code...)
It is an impressive device, without a doubt ; but I wouldn't say it fits the same category as the Zaurus.

It really isn't a pocketable device ; at least you won't feel confortable with it in any pocket.
However, it is well suited to be carried in a bag and used as a tiny and lightweight laptop.
The CPU is very impressive. You can play virtually any video without a glitch, even run most 3+ year old games. And since it's a x86 device, you have an unlimited supply of software. Otherwise, the wifi is quite good (except when used in tablet mode, probably because the antena is near the screen) ; I like the trackpoint a lot too.

However, what truly lacks is the instant suspend/resume feature, which rules out the title of Zaurus killer (beside the size).

Fortunately, I think the x86 familiy has made so much progress (size and power-consumption wise) that we might expect Z-footprint x86 devices soon.

4
PocketPenguin / Form Factor - Handheld Pc, Or Zaurus-style?
« on: September 27, 2006, 06:09:58 pm »
I must agree. I have tried for a few days two UMPC (Q1 and the sony "UX180"(US) UX-90) and quite frankly, it isn't worth it when compared to some ultra portable laptops. There isn't any benefit given its size for most purposes, which isn't the case for smaller handleds like our much beloved zaurus. The right form factor really shouldn't be much bigger than a Cxx00, IMHO.

5
Off Topic forum / Why Would We Want Drm?
« on: April 21, 2006, 09:50:30 pm »
I dunno why they would want DRM. Most linux software is open source, so you might have a look at the source and bypass any restriction anyway. Plus Stallman sounds very unhappy with DRM and want to ban them in GPL 3. If you find the transcripted presentation he made a while ago, you'll find all the reasons he gave. Who could blame him ? I don't like my rights to be restricted anyway.

6
Zaurus - pdaXrom / Php/apache Zaurus (pdaxrom) Weird Issue
« on: April 21, 2006, 02:55:44 pm »
Maybe you have a problem with pcre ? Do you have package pcre installed (it's in the pdaX feed) ?
You might try to replace the faulty with eregi('\.(jpeg|jpg|gif|png)$', $file) which should work perfectly.

7
Zaurus - pdaXrom / Pdaxrom Apps And Openzaurus Gpe
« on: April 21, 2006, 12:44:11 pm »
Quote
Yes, the packages in the feeds are all arm4 because OZ supports a range of hardware and only uses one feed. What does pdaX do (it supports the 5500 I thought)? That said, if you build your own packages for a given machine, they are optimised for that arch automatically.

You're right about that, OE does support a lot more machines. But the point is, why one single armv4 feed (well, convenience for maintenance and disk space may be reasons, but still.) Building the whole OE is not something everyone will want to do. I can tell because I actually did it once, and only the bootstrap image. It took time, and a lot of disk space. I just wanted a 121MB / partition.

Quote
Yes, fpa vs vfp - vfp is probably faster (I'd be interested to see benchmarks actually) and certainly makes programming/cross-compiling easier (the floating point data have the same endianness as the processor with vfp, with fpa they are always little endian iirc). vfp will be supported once th eabi toolchain is up and running. I must look at the patches that pdaX uses to implement vfp for its toolchain when I have some time.

Once again, you're right, there won't be a big improvement (in a 0~10% range, is fp is used at all of course), but still it would be better if we could have everything running vfp, which is the recommanded option for the platform. Having "Cannot link /tmp/X.o because libc6... uses FPA while ... does not" is not a friendly error, it means "go and rebuild your whole toolchain" (my mistake trying to make a working and optimized GCC4.1.0 vfp toolchain...)

Quote
My understanding was that this is a hack that is 2.4.x only? Still, something is probably necessary under 2.6.x (I don't have one of these machines so I don't know much about it.)

I don't think so... I even found a enable_iwmmxt-r0.patch for 2.6.16 somewhere in the OE commits, but everything is so "complicated", sashz working alone doesn't have those problems. While we're at it, you made mention of EABI toolchains. The iwmmxt EABI in GCC 4.1.0 (and CVS) with glibc 2.4 is supposed to be improved, according to changelogs. You have to edit a little bit to get vfp working. I couldn't make it work with the OE build system, but I just probably don't know exactly how it works. But it would be great if someone could manage to build the armv5te iwmmxt EABI toolchain.

Quote
Interesting!? Did you try to run the resulting binary on a pdaX system? This might be the cause of the problems.

No, in fact it was with OZ 3.5.4.1-alpha2. But I might have played a bit with -mfloat as well, maybe to try making vfp work. I will test it again to find the exact cause of the problem.

Quote
Standard .tgz? What crack are you on? ipkg has been using ar-wrapped tarballs for years now, so the *standard* is what OZ is using. pdaX is using a *non*-standard ipkg format. Please get your facts straight before posting nonsense. (ask the ipkg author if you don't believe me)

You are being disrespectful. http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/Ipkg doesn't impose ar wrapped ipks at all. It only says gzipped ipks are a waste of CPU, which is true. By "standard", I only meant the most used. The Sharp ROM and Cacko used targz ipks last time I checked. Do not forget that OE isn't the only ROM around. And I'm not on crack, I'm just on patching GCC and glibc (is that worst ?)

8
Zaurus - pdaXrom / Pdaxrom Apps And Openzaurus Gpe
« on: April 21, 2006, 09:15:30 am »
I'd say the problem is IPKG v0.99 in OZ (painfully SLOW ! not standard targz ipks !). But on the other hand the strong point of OZ is the 2.6 kernel and the newer glibc.
You're right about floating point format too. I found that glibc from OZ uses FPA, while pdaX is all softvfp (a very logical choice if you ask me). OZ builds arm- targets rather poorly optimized, but it's because they need compatibility with old zaurus OZ was originally created for. There are -mtune xscale but no -mcpu targets, and no iwmmxt. This is all because of untested bitbake configs (don't they have a single SL-Cxx00 ?). Softfloat seems totally messy to me as well. With GCC from the OZ devel/ feed, a simple printf("%f \n", 5/2); will print 3.0000000000 (!!) if you try any PXA270 optimization flags (-mcpu xscale or -mcpu iwmmxt or softvfp). The best thing to do would be to have the same GCC build settings, and softvfp everywhere, because it's what will work best on XScales.
Do not be hard on OZ, though. Their 2.6.16 kernel is far better, it probably required a lot of work, and it suspends PERFECTLY well, and very fast with that.

9
Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Openzaurus 3.5.4.1 Testing
« on: April 15, 2006, 03:29:27 pm »
I flashed the latest OZ/Bootstrap just to give a go to the 2.6.16 kernel (being a pdaXrom user actually); I must say it was rather impressive, the device has no suspend problem of any sort, it's fast and not too much memory hungry.

However, altough I carfully resized to root partition to use all the space before flashing, it seems like the MTD definitions are hard coded in the zImage. I found a configure option in the monotone/BB tree to set the home size, but it's really painful to force the user to use 60/60 by default (and building OZ only for THAT is beyond simplicity). Or did I miss something ?

ipkg 0.99 is absolutely TERRIBLE as well. I wonder how come it COULD be so slow ? And the tarred ipks were much more convenient to handle ... well, anyway, if you want to stick with that. Other than that, OZ has greatly improved in a short time, especially the kernel.

10
Zaurus - pdaXrom / Pdaxrom 1.1.0beta3 For C1000/c3100/c3200 And X86
« on: April 11, 2006, 08:08:23 pm »
GCC is 3.4.6 in the feed. Could you update the zgcc image ? That would kinda make sense.

11
Zaurus - pdaXrom / Help Blanker
« on: April 04, 2006, 02:30:15 pm »
I've got the same issue, and it's true the Blanker applet is broken since beta1. I don't know why the screen shuts off after resume on battery, even when you're typing text, which is of course a totally unexpected behaviour, but a report should be submitted on the tracker.

12
Zaurus - pdaXrom / Dosbox Configuration...frontier
« on: March 24, 2006, 09:30:08 am »
The dosbox IPKs in the pdaXrom feeds are not very usable actually. I would recommand to make a build of the current CVS configured with --disable-debug (I don't see what use it could have to play games)  --disable-fpu / --disable-fpu-x86 may increase speed a lot (since ARM donsn't like floating point at all) and something like dynamic core (configure --help to find the exact flag) is totally useless on XScale CPU, so better disable it and make smaller and faster binaries (you can strip them as well). Then you shall run dosbox -startmapper to remap keys (they are quite messed up by default, no Fn working ... but you can easily rebind everything in the mapper with a nice dos-like GUI !) and it should run Frontier Elite okay.

13
Deals and Great Z Buys / Seagate 8gb Microdrives On Ebay
« on: March 17, 2006, 05:24:16 pm »
Greetings,

I noticed a lot of Seagate 8GB CF drives for less than $160 nowadays, and decided to pick up one.
It works OK in my SL-C1000, and having so much space available for games, music and movies is nice.

A lot of them are selling for $153. Just browse http://search.ebay.com/8GB-seagate-CF and chose one.

NB : This drive can also be purchased on Amazon for $150 shipped if you live in the US : http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BO0SG...282452?n=172282

14
Zaurus - pdaXrom / Any Lightweight Alternatives To The Gimp?
« on: March 16, 2006, 04:05:27 pm »
If you like command line and efficiency, ImageMagick is a real wonder, altough it's maybe a bit unfriendly to use ...

15
Zaurus - pdaXrom / Working Tiemu
« on: March 15, 2006, 06:50:34 pm »
http://zaurus.maxg.info

It was a pain to get tiemu working, and it will segfault sometimes. Sometimes it may look for shared files in /mnt/card/ti (probably a confiure error from me ...) ; just ln it to /usr and it should be ok.

It's rather slow, too. Maybe that was an understatement.

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