sashz has been talking about improving his uboot support so that the new pdaxrom could be installed onto SD. If he can do that then surely he can get it to install to MD too hence aping the OZ spitz release install method giving a unified release for all C3x00 owners. This would be a great advance for the distro and one of the greatest events ever for the C3000 platform.
If this isn't going to happen anytime soon then what are the chances Thc and iamasmith could team up to port us this ultimate C3000 rom?
The wait to see 2.6 kernel w/ vid accel and overclocking on my C3000 is killing me! Any day now zodttd will release his new zpsx (or is it psx4all now?). For anyone who has followed emulators since their beginning like me this is a major event and I'd prefer to see it when it happens. This new zpsx release (or +1 at least) will be great for all cxxxx owners as it will be one of the best ways to showcase the power of your clamshell Z. I talked my dad into buying a Z so he could run the same software on the Z as on the PC. That was almost a year ago now and the limitations of Cacko are really starting to frustrate us, especially since we have seen what we could be running.
From what I've read, it sounds as if somebody will need to write an iwmmx accelerated version of the mplayer rotation video filter so we don't have to reencode hi-res vids, or has this been done already for mplayer-bvdd?
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I'm probably never going to be interested in doing a great deal of Linux work on the SL-C3000 any more since working with OpenBSD for a bit. I won't turn this into a pro BSD vs Linux discussion - there are plenty of threads giving merits of one over the other all over the internet but I will pass on some observations here.
The last time I looked at running Linux entirely form the HD on the SL-C3000 (that time using a pivot_root mechanism) was when the OpenEmbedded folks had started to use this mechanism to implement the OPIE (and latterly GPE) ROMs for the SL-C3000.
I took this work and suggested to Thc a means whereby the pdaXrom image could be taken and run in the same manner.
The problem, at the time, seemed to be related to handling of suspend and the fact that the Kernel didn't flush and correctly suspend the hard drive.. this led to a few folk having problems particularly if heavy drive activity was present at suspend time. This may have been fixed in the 2.6 Kernel.. I'm not really sure, however, the only stable distribution that was available that ran from the HD of the 3000 and did correctly suspend the HD was OpenBSD.
With this issue present (if indeed it still is) then a heavy reliance upon the Flash filesystem for general operating system use and reliance on the HDD for user data storage seems sensible... hence the popularity of the 3100/3200 units.
With the issue fixed then there is really no need to wish for 128Mb Flash memory in the unit and the 16Mb of the SL-C3000 seems like less of a waste to host a simple bootstrap to start the unit from disk instead.
I now will not go back to using Linux on the SL-C3000 because I am running a whole distribution on my unit, complete with ports system and man pages which is identical to the desktop environment.. I also hold dear some of the other pro-BSD views (focus on stability, security and pro BSD license) so it is very unlikely that my interest will take me back to creating Linux ROMs for the 3000 unit specifically.
My suggestions are as follows...
OZ GPE seems like it might offer you a lot of what you want to do and they actively support the SL-C3000 so I assume that they are at work on (or maybe have fixed) HDD suspend/resume issues. Video acceleration etc. is something that you could probably discuss with them.
pxaXrom doesn't seem to have ever really supported the SL-C3000 with an origin based distribution. This is probably related to the dev guys not having units to test with but also possibly related to HDD issues and the fact that it is established and working on the 3100/3200 units. It is undoubtedly very cool running on these units.
I would suggest that you consider how you want to use the unit day-to-day and consider if one of the OE flavours may suit your requriements better. I know that they are starting to produce distros with 'Enlightenment' instead of GPE and if you have a reasonable Linux knowledge you could even take the bootstrap (bare Linux, no GPE and no OPIE) and build your ideal customised environment on it - given that they might have done all the hard work of resolving suspend/resume issues, video acceleration and more importantly have their patches included in the stock 2.6 Kernel sources this seems like a great way of producing your own environment.
Why am I going all pro OE on this one you may ask? well if you start to develop ROMs for these units you find that unless you are targetting what you are doing day-to-day yourself with the ROM the returns are zero for you (in fact not zero but negative since your Zaurus isn't running anything useful to you whilst you are doing the work for something that you don't need anyway). It is also possible to spot the trend of diminishing returns on any effort that you expend when new hardware emerges and the mainstream distributions go for this hardware - i.e. anyone purchasing a Zaurus now to run pdaXrom will almost certainly buy a 1000, 3100 or 3200. This means essentially that you put in a lot of work that you won't use yourself and the community which you are specifically attempting to help is diminishing all the time.
The only pragmatic solution to supporting devices in this category is to recognise the device dependent elements, make them most abstract between the devices and make the rest of the ROM distribution more or less generic across the device - the OE philosophy works fairly well in this respect.
That all being said, if the new bootloader works well on the 3000, the HD suspend thing is sorted etc. etc. etc. then pdaXrom may well be just the thing for you on the 3000. It would need someone with Linux skills who was inclined to adapt it to the 3000 layout to work on it though.
-Andy
