Zaurus Sl-c3200 Applications And Speed?

[mathemajikian]

I'm thinking about buying a zaurus SL-C3200 to install openbsd on but I have a few questions I would liked answered before doing so.

1. What is the speed of application execution?
2. How long does it take to open fluxbox, firefox, opera, openoffice, mplayer, gaim, and xmms applications?
3. Is video/mp3 playback smooth or choppy?
4. What is the battery life while playing a movie via mplayer or mp3's via xmms?
5. Can skype be built/used?
6. What hardware/functionality is still not working correctly?
7. Can openbsd be installed on the entire disk if a rom is installed in the flash memory of the device?
8. Can it be made to automatically boot openbsd after booting into the linux based rom?

Thanks in advance!  

[iamasmith]

I'm thinking about buying a zaurus SL-C3200 to install openbsd on but I have a few questions I would liked answered before doing so.

1. What is the speed of application execution?

Reasonable, this isn't a high performance system but a lot of things are reasonably good if you do some simple things to tune file system access like mount the file system with noatime and softdep flags.

2. How long does it take to open fluxbox, firefox, opera, openoffice, mplayer, gaim, and xmms applications?

No data on most of these, Opera is binary only so you can't have it. Firefox has some outstanding build issues on arm-openbsd related to nspr library and nobody wants to bother with it because it's really too big to run on a Zaurus and do anything else meaningful.

OpenOffice takes a few days to build on a desktop based system, haven't come across anybody that would want to build OpenOffice for the Zaurus.

I did build KDE base for it though and found it unworkably slow so I suggest OpenOffice is a meaningless exercise.

3. Is video/mp3 playback smooth or choppy?
4. What is the battery life while playing a movie via mplayer or mp3's via xmms?

I use an iPod for this, this is a UNIX system for me, not some convergent technology toy.

5. Can skype be built/used?

Nope, Skype is only available for Windows/Macintosh/Linux in binary only format and that is for i386 systems only. No Zaurus ROM will run it.

6. What hardware/functionality is still not working correctly?

at the moment: SD-MMC, NAND flash access, and USB Client (host mode is perfect).

7. Can openbsd be installed on the entire disk if a rom is installed in the flash memory of the device?
8. Can it be made to automatically boot openbsd after booting into the linux based rom?

Yes and yes.

Thanks in advance! 

No problem,

-Andy

[mathemajikian]

So will openbsd continue to support development of the Zaurus port or will this project just die off? What is the battery life of the device while running openbsd vs pdaxrom?

Thanks



at the moment: SD-MMC, NAND flash access, and USB Client (host mode is perfect).

7. Can openbsd be installed on the entire disk if a rom is installed in the flash memory of the device?
8. Can it be made to automatically boot openbsd after booting into the linux based rom?

Yes and yes.

Thanks in advance!  

No problem,

-Andy
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=134343\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
[/quote]

[iamasmith]

So will openbsd continue to support development of the Zaurus port or will this project just die off? What is the battery life of the device while running openbsd vs pdaxrom?

Thanks

The future of the Zaurus port is pretty certain since the Zaurus specific elements are very small parts of the project. Basically once the device support is enabled within OpenBSD you can expect a port to be supported from then on... when OpenBSD goes through a version upgrade there is minimal chance that any work needs to be carried out to make it Zaurus compatible since the project is well coded and aimed at portability anyway.

Battery life will is determined primarily by the constant use of the hard disk. Expect 3-4 hours of runtime for OpenBSD. pdaXrom probably longer but I don't have any figures on that since I have an SL-C3000 and the flash is too small to carry a full pdaXrom install.

-Andy

[mathemajikian]

Still waiting for my Zaurus to arrive. So in the meantime I have a quick question. Can I build most of the packages in the ports tree on the Zaurus? Does openbsd support linux emulation under the ARM ARCH?

[hus]

Just wondering if anyone though of recompiling OpenBSD with softfloat to gain extra speed

[iamasmith]

OpenBSD already uses softfloat

-Andy