I first want to say that I appreciate all the work you guys did in creating pdaXrom. I installed beta1 last year when I got my 3100, and, although there were a few problems and limitations, it has been very useful.
I was hoping that going to the latest beta r198 would be an improvement. I had been afraid to try to upgrade, since the new uBoot and 2.6 kernels seemed to be causing some difficulties, but decided it was time to take the plunge. Actually, I had been waiting for a long time for the next stable release.... Well, this resulted in 24 solid hours of nightmarish problems.
OK, things aren't really set up to go from beta1 to the new version. Why not? That is gripe #1. I can understand not supporting people coming from oz or cacko, but... In following the "quick install" instructions to install uBoot, doing a low-level flash, I semi-permanently bricked my Zaurus. It took hours of trying the various Vulcan death grip boot sequences to get it to, one time, boot to the nand image. Why? I have no idea. I then managed, thanks to
www.trisoft.de to restore the original Sharp rom, so I could start over. I re-loaded the uboot package, and found that OK+plugin would only boot the emergency image occasionally. Usually the thing would just sit there, emulating a brick again.
I then put a new image on the CF card, and managed to OK-start it eventually, and never, ever, got the question about whether I wanted to install. Went back to Sharp rom, re-formatted the hard drive, tried again, same deal. df indicated that /dev/hda1 was mounted on /mnt/cf, but it was the wrong size and unmount would not believe that it was mounted. So, I mounted /dev/hdc1 (the cf card) on /mnt/card, went there, and tried to run the ./autoboot.sh script. Never ran. I looked at it, and it was pretty simple, so entered the lines directly.
This is where I should mention that the link from the downloads page for the 3100 was to an akita image (and was so labelled). Anyway, it installed OK it seemed, and even booted. Claimed to be a borzoi, which was correct. But, df indicated only one partition, of size 128M. What happened to the hard drive? Well, duh, the script did exactly what it was supposed to do --- if I actually had a 1000. It installed the system on the flash. It ignored the existence of the hard drive.
Now, my hard drive was not a clean Sharp image. I had resized and reformatted the partitions when I installed beta1. But /dev/hda1 was formatted ext2, so it should have found that at least. Besides, from what the script says, it would install on the flash no matter what. Either remove 3000/3100/3200 from the link, or construct a new package that really can install on these machines. When the script says nandwrite /dev/mtd2 $file , it is probably going to write the image to the flash, not the hard drive.
At this point, I began casting about for a way to end my frustration. Unfortunately, I was unarmed, so instead of shooting something, I tried Angstrom.
From re-flash of the Sharp rom, re-format, etc., to a working system took maybe 45 minutes, and some of that was due to the fact that my hard drive was not formatted the way it was expected to be. But Angstrom keeps its mount instructions in /etc/fstab, so I could change the default vfat partition of /dev/hda3 (why??) to ext2. Next boot, no problem.
pdaXrom still has better feeds, which unfortunately don't run on Angstrom as far as I can determine. But the keyboard works (one thing that made me upgrade was that I decided to change the definition of one of the shortcut keys, and so of course lost the . -- which I used to know how to fix, but...), and the keys mean the same thing in all modes. Upgrade is trivial, just as it is in debian -- this is something that pdaXrom needs to fix. Angstrom is not quite as full-fledged-computer feeling as is pdaXrom, with everything running in fullscreen mode, but then, after all, it is a small screen.
Oh, well. Maybe someone else can tell me what stupid thing I did wrong. But it'll take a bit of convincing to get me to try this again.
Sorry to rant, but some of these things are things people should know about. Or, at least tall me where I went wrong.
