Hi all,
I finished the Install of Debian on my 3200 last night. Very impressive, that makes the Zaurus really usefull. So first thanks to the developer as well as for all the info in this post. Here a few words about my Installation:
Target: Zaurus CL-3200 / no Mods / DLink Prism2 CF WiFi Card
SD-Card: Transcend 150x 4GB card, rerofmatted to 640MB and a big empty space.
Debian Image: Debian 4.0 Etch Netinstall
Installation:
Installing the bootloader and the installer wasn´t a problem at all. They began with the installer itself. The biggest problems caused the SD Driver. I/O Errors happened all the time. But it worked fine when I unmounted the SD, removed it, then plugged it in again and remounted it. I had to do this about five times or so before I was able to run the installation smoothly. The Partitioner asked me which type of table it should use, i chose msdos.
The message about the identity problems came as well, but disappeared when I installed the mirror-choose. I chose a good mirror and the rest just happened like on a PC. Warnings about the missing kernel and bootloader where easy to ignore.
Post Installation:
The clock was set to 0 (Unix Time), I had to chose a new password and hat to set the network up again. One of the big problems was the installation of the zaurus-hardware-support package. I had to load the module snd-pxa2xx-ac97 to avoid error messages about missing devices during the installation. After that it was perfect. I installed the fullscale titchy package, replaced xdm with gdm and everything works fine so far.
Problems:
In battery mode the display occasionly starts flickering. Not too serious but annoying. Iceweasel of course takes an awfull lot of time to load but runs smooth after loading it. I think about replacing it with epiphany. Should be a bit faster. Dillo works usually but crashes on some occasions. Sylpheed works great. Didn´t make it GPG ready yet, but will follow.
A funny thing is that I can´t ping the zaurus until I ping the other side from the zaurus. I don´t know why that is, but its annoying. I like to do administrativ stuff via ssh, but the connections break of after about ten to twenty minutes.
The SD driver seems to have a problem. I tried to format my 4GB SD with ext2, but it never finished, in fact the whole zaurus had to be rebooted.
Ah and the touchscreen. It works, but quite often not very accurate. It happens that the curser flickers arround like crazy while the stylus is standing still or moves slowly.
Jabber Client:
I removed Gaim and installed mcabber with SSL and GPG support. Works great and fast, even with GPG encryption. I had to compile it myself to get the latest version and GPG support. For that I installed gcc, g++, libssl-dev, libgnutls-dev, libgpgme11-dev, libgpgme6, openssl, make and bison. I´m not sure if all of them are necessary but that worked fine. Anyone who does only need a jabber client will do fine with mcabber. Very lightweighted.
Emacs:
I find nano and vim okay but very annoying because I´m so used to emacs. I removed vim and nano to replace it with emacs21-nox. That needs 40 Megs of my valuable space but works amazingly fast on the zaurus. I think I´ll extend it for the usage of mail, news and so on.
Conclusion and further steps:
YES I AM HAPPY
A full scale Debian is available on my Zaurus, I´m really hapy about that. All the little bugs are a bit annoying but the whole thing is acceptable. I plan to replace some apps with text based equivalents. The mail program for exampe is just in my way as it is. I need a fast, lightweight and smallscreen friendly client. mutt or emacs would do fine. I think I´ll go through all this to set up a little mail system on the zaurus. Encrypted instant messaging works fine already, next is email, but that depends on the final client. I´m surprides by the speed gpg works on the Zaurus. Could be worse!
I´ll report about further experients as soon as I finished them.
cu
xeon
