My Poodle Is Not Working Properly Anymore

[Jinidog]

Hello,

some days after I installed altboot to my openzaurus 3.5.3, it did not work properly anymore.
I figured out, that the /var directory was emtpy at every reboot and that was the reason, why the X server didn't start anymore.
Well, creating the directory was only a solution until the next reboot (and I reboot often, because I'm tryed to bring gentoo on the zaurus).
Well, there was a strange error.
When I called dmesg the first time, it printed my out some lines, but then it simply hangs and I cannot do anything anymore, I can give up the console.
Any new start of dmesg hangs without any output.

Well, the console hangs when I want to ls larger directorys.
And the zaurus does not boot into my gentoo, that is mounted over NFS, anymore.
You see, very strange errors I never experienced befor.

Well, I reflashed the whole zaurus (the kernel too) with the latest hentges ROM and there is still the same problem.
So I have to think, that there is something wrong with the hardware.

Maybe can somebody save my zaurus?

[Jinidog]

Seems as if this is more related to a bad connection between the zaurus and my PC, when I type in the commands directly into the poodle by using it's keyboard, everything works.
Problems only occur when using the poodle via ssh over usbd.
Had no time to test, but perhaps there is a problem in the 2.6.14 kernel, I think the problem occurs since I updated my PC to it.

[Jinidog]

Well, I found out that it is a bug in kernel 2.6.14 and above.
I posted already a bugreport, but nobody seems to care...

[grog]

I'm not sure about the kernel problems, but the /var filesystem being empty after a reboot is a side effect of it being a memory-only area. Look at the file /etc/default/volatiles (IIRC, I'm not running OZ right now so I can't check). That's where you set up extra stuff you need recreated under /var on reboot. For example, I have my actual /var/cron directory under /home/cron, with a setting in volatiles to symlink it to /var/cron on reboot.

HTH

[cstrand1]

Hello,

I too have a 5600 and I reflash quite often.  I found that when I reflash to different images, there can be problems.

My fix and I read it in another post, is to first delete the root directory under home and recreate.  Then I reflash back to the original Sharp ROM, then I flash the ROM that I want to try.  This procedure fixed a lot of strange behavior when reflashing.

Chuck