My New C3200 Now Running Pdaxrom Beta 3

[zi99y]

I've now had my C3200 for a couple of days after waiting intently since ordering from Conics 2 weeks ago. I'd recommend using Conics as they are very friendly and good at emailing, and the wait was mainly down to customs etc.

I played with Sharprom for about an hour before I decided to go ahead and flash with pdaxrom - There was a huge learning curve, mainly because the information needed is spread across the net, but with help from the OESF forums, pdaxrom documentation, Zaurus wiki's, and meanie's handy customization tips, I'm getting there.

Here are my observations:

1. I've reflashed pdaxrom about 4 times now, and it's strange, each time it installs a different set of default applications - or at least, links to them - I had about 5 games at first, and on my recent install there is only one.

2. Now discovered to do one thing at a time - 1 package etc. and take it slow, running before you can walk has landed my on my face several times.

3. Turning on from cold - this is very scary, sometimes I just can't get the machine to power on, I've tried all steps I have heard, battery out for 5 secs, reset button, holding d+b when power on etc. but sometimes I just have to keep doing random things and hitting the power button before I will get any life out of it - strange.

4. Discovered that the suspend actually works perfectly, at first I thought it was broken but when resuming you must press the power button and wait - it will stay on a black screen for a couple of seconds before resuming

5. Some apps are sloooooow to load - I was hoping to be able to use firefox, but it takes an age to load and isn't very responsive once it's up - the only alternatives I can find is mozilla (same deal) and the default dillo, which is quite nice, but not very advanced - no css etc. Also the virtual keyboard is slow to load which is annoying.

6. I cannot get my .bash_profile working, I just want to add ~/bin to the path so that I can use my shell scripts and aliases.

7. Must get used to installing packages with "ipkg -d ide3 install <packagename>", it's daft that the default is the / partition which has no space... will look into setting a default or making an alias

8. Changing resolution to 320x240 using the command "xrandr -s 1" works a treat, but changing back makes half the task bar dissappear, so you can't see the clock etc.

9. Rox filer is very useful, the default desktop was useless and I still can't work out how to add/remove icons from the menu. I think they should make ROX the default.

10. Snes9x emulator works very nicely when you use low res mode - I was very surprised to see it running so nice

11. Have added a new user in /etc/passwd but using this to login doesn't allow to run X

--- more to follow ---

[Cresho]

Exactly what I went throgh and that was half a year ago.

[karlto]

Hi zi99y

I believe some more information on some of these issues is lurking in these forums somewhere (sorry, I'm too lazy to go find them...), but here is what I recall...

3. Turning on from cold - this is very scary, sometimes I just can't get the machine to power on, I've tried all steps I have heard, battery out for 5 secs, reset button, holding d+b when power on etc. but sometimes I just have to keep doing random things and hitting the power button before I will get any life out of it - strange.

Yes, this often seems to happen when shutting down the correct way, yet it doesn't if reset - it seems like you just have to wait and keep pressing buttons. I think someone offered an explanation that may have been more hardware related

4. Discovered that the suspend actually works perfectly, at first I thought it was broken but when resuming you must press the power button and wait - it will stay on a black screen for a couple of seconds before resuming

This is mostly the resume scripts - chop out the stuff you don't need and it will go faster (some stuff is needed though). On my z you can actually see that the screen is on, but the backlight doesn't go until these scripts are finished.

5. Some apps are sloooooow to load - I was hoping to be able to use firefox, but it takes an age to load and isn't very responsive once it's up - the only alternatives I can find is mozilla (same deal) and the default dillo, which is quite nice, but not very advanced - no css etc. Also the virtual keyboard is slow to load which is annoying.

We are all waiting for the new model with 1Gb of RAM and a much much faster CPU... (I wish)

6. I cannot get my .bash_profile working, I just want to add ~/bin to the path so that I can use my shell scripts and aliases.

If you are using aterm or another terminal under X, you'll need to add a switch to tell it to use your login profile (try '-ls')

7. Must get used to installing packages with "ipkg -d ide3 install <packagename>", it's daft that the default is the / partition which has no space... will look into setting a default or making an alias

Don't quote me on this, but maybe the default location is simply the first one in /etc/ipkg.conf?

11. Have added a new user in /etc/passwd but using this to login doesn't allow to run X

Many discussions in this forum about this issue - default settings not really designed for an unprivileged user. I'm sure someone got it to work though, so have a look through the forums if you are keen to get this sorted.

--- more to follow ---

There always is, but once you start getting it all working you'll never look back

[zi99y]

karlto: thanks for taking the time to reply there, very helpful.

I'm gradually wading through the forums to find the answers, and have held off from posting until now because I realise most of what I am experienced will have been addresed before. The idea of me posting a bunch of points here really was to create some 3200 specific stuff as there wasn't much to read before I made my purchase - hopefully this will help other prospective buyers.

Making more progress hour by hour, I picked the perfect time to get it as I am (literally) between jobs and the more I find out the more I'm loving it.

cheers!

[Cresho]

definetly will find answers as i did.  The Zaurus is like a second wife to many just as many have posted.

[zi99y]

--- continued ---

11. Seems to be something wrong with terminal emulation, tried aterm, gtkterm2, xterm & rxvt and they all go screwy when using vi to edit a file - trying vim now and so far it seems fixed (discovered in mid sentence!)

12. Battery indicator doesn't appear very accurate - from charging all day (100%) to a few minutes later it went down to 53% - makes you a bit worried about battery life but I don't believe what it says

13. Looking for a decent gui text editor - leafpad is really nice but the *one* really annoying thing is that I can't select blocks of text with the keyboard, normally the shift key would do this - and it works fine on ubuntu

[loji]

I recently got myself a C1000 and use beta 3 ... I'm trying to keep track of the fixes that I've done to get it running smoothly. . I have them collected here:

beta3 tweaks + fixes


Maybe some of them will help you?     And let me know what tricks you come up with for beta3 and I'll happily add them.  

[sds]

11. Have added a new user in /etc/passwd but using this to login doesn't allow to run X

Many discussions in this forum about this issue - default settings not really designed for an unprivileged user. I'm sure someone got it to work though, so have a look through the forums if you are keen to get this sorted.

I am not aware of any issue with the normal user accounts created using the standard "useradd" script.
Look here.

[zi99y]

loji that is a really great page you've made there, I hope you've put a link in the Wiki, if not I'll have a look soon and sort it. I'm puzzling through it but not exactly sure if what I'm doing is always right so am a bit hesitant to add to it (yet), but will bear it in mind.

and thanks sds, I think I've sorted the regular user now, I set up with useradd and copied my entire root profile (chowning all to me), and it seems to be working well now. Although the X load time seems to be a bit longer, like it's waiting for a command to timeout, hmm, will do a little further investigation there.

I can't believe how much tweaking is needed to get pdaxrom working! Just hope I don't have to do this again anytime soon, but then, it's all learning

ps. Vim seems to fix the terminal weirdness, but now the arrow keys echo nasty chars to the screen in edit mode, two step forward .5 steps back.....

[karlto]

ps. Vim seems to fix the terminal weirdness, but now the arrow keys echo nasty chars to the screen in edit mode, two step forward .5 steps back.....
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This can happen with vim on any installation - have a look for a decent ~/.vimrc settings file (there must be heaps on the net).

[zi99y]

Got another .vimrc in place and seems to have done the trick! thanks karlto.

I'm getting on great, and it all looks and runs very well now- here's my new/current things that I'm looking at fixing etc.


Stuff I've fixed:

- Keymappings are now perfect, I've edited openbox's rc.xml and added mappings to adjust windows to fullscreen / decorations / moving etc. and made keyboard navigation much nicer in general. I notice there are quite a lot of guides on this so I won't go into detail but I may post somewhere a killer config once it's complete.

- Got XMMS working with the CE-RH2 remote by making a custom mapping file for xmodmap - works fine as long as the XMMS window is in focus, which isn't really a problem. Then I turn brightness right down so the screen goes off and put it in my bag with a bit playlist for me to flick though while on the move

- Decided mrxvt is the nicest terminal app, looks good and the tabs are easy to flick through with the shift+arrows key combo, just like yaKuake on my ubuntu machine.

- Leafpad now treats shift selecting correctly - not sure why but must be to do with tinkering with key mappings.


Problems:

- I think there's something wrong with my network connection - using wifi cf card or usb-linux connection, they both work fine except I can't connect using gaim/msn, and sylpheed won't connect to the gmail pop server for some reason, I'm wondering if it could be some ports are blocked as http/port80 is fine. Oh but port 22 is ok as I can connect remotely via ssh...

- Silkscreen doesn't seem to work which is really annoying when the screen is folded over in pda mode. I think this may be a general problem with the CXX00 range as I saw an unanswered post from another person having this problem. When you tap in this region it is as though you are clicking on the far right side of the screen , usually a scroll bar.

- Can't get IR transfers working with my W800i phone, I know the phone is setup as it worked in sharprom without a hitch.

- Now home & enter keys do not work in the bash shell, works elsewhere so guess I'll have to learn about how to set it up in the bash profile or terminal config.


Next I think I'm going to do away with the panel and install XFCE as there's some niggling things that could do with improvement - like a window list, appearing on every screen etc.

If anyone out there is going with a C3200 or similar wants to share thoughts/ideas/problems, get in touch. Soon I hope I'll be ready to start learning cross compiling    ooo

[apink]

6. I cannot get my .bash_profile working, I just want to add ~/bin to the path so that I can use my shell scripts and aliases.

If you are using aterm or another terminal under X, you'll need to add a switch to tell it to use your login profile (try '-ls')

I have put

Code: [Select]

Aterm*loginShell: truein ~/.Xdefaults to get the same result.

This web page helped me:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=68555

Here's my forum discussion on this:

https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=20997&hl=

[desertrat]

I'm getting on great, and it all looks and runs very well now- here's my new/current things that I'm looking at fixing etc.

Glad you're making progress and enjoying yourself.

- Leafpad now treats shift selecting correctly - not sure why but must be to do with tinkering with key mappings.

This is what fixed the shift select for me:
https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showt...ndpost&p=129622

- I think there's something wrong with my network connection - using wifi cf card or usb-linux connection, they both work fine except I can't connect using gaim/msn, and sylpheed won't connect to the gmail pop server for some reason, I'm wondering if it could be some ports are blocked as http/port80 is fine. Oh but port 22 is ok as I can connect remotely via ssh...

Maybe your ISP is blocking those ports? My crummy ISP recently started blocking SMTP, I had to configure my mailserver to listen to an extra port to bypass that.

- Silkscreen doesn't seem to work which is really annoying when the screen is folded over in pda mode. I think this may be a general problem with the CXX00 range as I saw an unanswered post from another person having this problem. When you tap in this region it is as though you are clicking on the far right side of the screen , usually a scroll bar.

I'm most likely that other person having the same problem. Still haven't seen any posts from other CXX00 owners to confirm whether or not silkscreen works for them

- Now home & enter keys do not work in the bash shell, works elsewhere so guess I'll have to learn about how to set it up in the bash profile or terminal config.

You could use Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E for Home and End respectively. Ctrl-D does Delete.

-- cheers

[zi99y]

Glad you're making progress and enjoying yourself.

I think I spoke too soon, after getting everything running smoothly I went for a play with xfce and everything has gone to hell. But I still have my openbox setup to fall back on

Maybe your ISP is blocking those ports? My crummy ISP recently started blocking SMTP, I had to configure my mailserver to listen to an extra port to bypass that.

Unlikely - I have some crazy networking going on, but I will check I can access smtp on another machine to check - but I use Gaim all the time on my ubuntu laptop so there must be something else going on there.

I'm most likely that other person having the same problem. Still haven't seen any posts from other CXX00 owners to confirm whether or not silkscreen works for them

That's a real shame, well if it works on older models, there must be a way of tweaking it to work. I'll try to investigate one day when I have fixed everything else (yeah right)

Thanks again for your input fellas. Even though it's causing frustration, I keep sitting back and just thinking "wow" - it really is an amazing, um, toy!