Z Newbie W/a Million Questions

[Storm]

Hi,

I just got my first Zaurus, an SL-5500. I'm transitioning from a Palm Tungsten|E, and I need some help. (Going from a Palm to a Z is like going from a Cessna to an F-15... )

I have about a million questions, but I start here at the ground floor. When I bought the Z (used, of course) it had an older version of OpenZaurus installed. I played around with it for a few days, then got serious about finding a ROM image. I have used, for limited amounts of time, the following:

OZ 3.5.2 - Had numerous issues with lockups/suspends, even when using the device. Also had problems with USB networking. I was able to install Opie and GPE side-by-side, and put the entire filesystem on my 512MB SD card. Was unable, in my testing, to get a web browser installed.

hybrid-sl5500-64-0-v1.1-qtopia-1.6.2 - Very pretty, and I like the fact that it "takes the best from Cracko, OZ and Sharp ROMS". I only played with it for a couple of hours, but immediately found that I was not able to get my wireless card (an AmbiCom WL1100C) to come up.

sl5500_cacko_beta-2.4.18 - Wireless came up quite nicely, but not as pretty as Hybrid. It also removes a lot of core apps that I would probably use. I have the cackorom-applications zipfile, and will probably try installing from that.

I haven't tried the Sharp ROM, but I would like to have a good percentage of my filesystem on the SD card (at least /tmp, /var, /home and /opt, if not more), and I didn't think, from what I have read so far, that this was a trivial exercise to accomplish. I'm also not adverse to trying others like pdaXrom...

So which ROM image would be best for my needs, which are basically PDA functionality (calendar, contacts, etc), multimedia functionality (mp3s, oggs, video), library (plucker, mobipocket-friendly book reader, Bible) and Linux/workstation stuff (browser/security apps like nmap, airsnort, kismet, etc)?

I am also having problems with various programs. From my limited experimentation, there seems to be apps that only run on the Sharp ROM, some are OZ-only...And the OZ apps are subdivided into GPE-based and Opie-based...Plus there are QPE-only apps. Is there somewhere I can go to clear up my confusion?

Finally, I noticed that, at least under OZ, apt had been ported. I have Debian on all of my machines (4 architectures including the Z), and I think that is one of Debian's finest contributions to the OpenSource community. Is the apt in OZ 3.5.2 ported to handle .ipks? And does it work on other ROM images? And does anyone have a canonical list of feeds? I have googled for them, but they are many and varied, and a lot of them don't work.

Sorry for the barrage of questions, and thank you for reading this far...

--Storm

[jomo]

Sharp, Cacko, and OZ are basically PDA ROMs.  PDA X-ROM is more general purpose and, if I recall correctly, actually includes miniaturized X-Windows, etc.  Cacko is actually a modification of the Sharp ROM, correcting a number of issues and idiosyncracies that the Sharp ROM has.  Stuff that works under Sharp should work under Cacko, but there are a few issues.  Unfortunately, I don't think Anton Maslovsky, the fellow who maintains Cacko, is currently developing new versions for the SL-5500/5600.   I think he's moved on to the SL-Cxxx Series.

You are correct in assuming that the Sharp ROM isn't going to work very well operating from an SD card.  It wasn't written/designed that way.  That's one of the big changes Anton and his predecessor made when they created Cacko from the Sharp source-code.

IPKs:  I discovered a couple of things here.
1. There are two types of IPK.  Sharp Ipks and OZ Ipks.   There's a note in the FAQs about this.  OZ packages are a different format than Sharp IPKs.  The Sharp IPK manager can't open/install OZ software and I believe the reverse is true as well.  Ie OZ can't install Sharp IPKs.  I also learned that it helps a whole lot if you install from a feed, especially when dealing with OZ.  There are a lot of Sharp ipks that install without dependencies, but even there, you're likely to find some packages that depend on other packages.  Since you have a wireless card, you will be a lot better off in this regard.  You can download directly to the zaurus.  Hope that helps.

[lardman]

Sharp, Cacko, and OZ are basically PDA ROMs. PDA X-ROM is more general purpose and, if I recall correctly, actually includes miniaturized X-Windows, etc.

OZ is also available with X11 - this is what GPE is.

The Sharp IPK manager can't open/install OZ software and I believe the reverse is true as well. Ie OZ can't install Sharp IPKs.

OZ can install either version.


Si