What's The Best Choice While Waiting For Pdaxrom 2?

[conundrum]

Hi everyone, I've been away for a while, and was never a big poster, and I just realized: I haven't been to these forums in ages.  Why?  Because pdaXII13 has been so good to me, and I've been busy with school.

Now I find myself back in the normal groove of things, wondering how much more I can squeeze out of my Z (It's been serving mostly as an mp3 player, web browser and ssh client), and what the best ROM to put on it is.  I've been using pdaX or some variation there of since I got my 860, and the trend has continued with my 3200.  Is pdaXii still the way to go, or have the Rxxx releases matured?  I don't mind betas (I've been using Zaurii for about 3 years now, I guess that goes without saying), and I would love to contribute in any way I can, but I do need a certain level of functionality.

Thanks for reading a long winded post!

[Capn_Fish]

I think the rxxx releases have been stable enough for me and only have some minor quirks, many of which are fixed by installing the service pack. Just about everything (No BVDD) works, and it doesn't crash for me, but YMMV.

It's really personal preference, though, so you may want to just try it and see what your opinion is.

[walts]

Hi everyone, I've been away for a while, and was never a big poster, and I just realized: I haven't been to these forums in ages.  Why?  Because pdaXII13 has been so good to me, and I've been busy with school.
[SNIP]

Your post sounds like I could have written it.  (except for the school part - I'm probably old enough to be your grandfather - LOL)

I've been using a variety of Zauri over the years, 5100, 6000, 1000, now 3200.  I really liked OZ but became discouraged when development ceased.  Angstrom is just too unfinished for me.  I'm an I.T. manager and justify the Zaurus at work as a portable tool for network auditing - hence wi-fi and tools like kismet/wellenreiter and nmap are essential, and I need those functions to work pretty much "out of the box".  I'm NOT a Linux geek, but enjoy learning.  I have a pretty good technical background in a lot of OSes but somehow Linux got left out of the mix.

I've used the original Sharp ROM (English version!), OZ, Cacko, Angstrom, the later revisions of pdaXrom (R198) but I keep on coming back to pdaXii13.  I recently upgraded to V2, (rev .4) and it is working well for me.  Since I'm still very much learning the 2.4 kernel, it looks like going to 2.6 is not a good idea for me right now, so I'll probably stick with this ROM for a while.  As has been stated elsewhere, Meanie's alpha code is more stable that a lot of released code.  

I'm not real clear as to what advantages the new kernel offers anyway.

I hope that's useful information.  Like you, I try to make what small contributions I can, but my technical expertise limits how much I can contribute.  BTW, there are several threads on this topic.  Search for "Which ROM?" and you'll find a few.

HTH

Walt

[conundrum]

I actually did do a quick search, but nothing of use turned up immediately, and I got impatient.  Mea culpa!

As far as the kernel versions, as an end user you will not notice much (if any) changes.  Think of it more as going from Win2k to XP than 3.11 to 95.  From my understanding 2.4 to 2.6 does yield improvements, but they're in the kernel itself more so than the users interaction with it.

Edit:  If you're in Florida you're probably old enough to be a lot of people's grandfather.  

[adf]

Very briefly, my impression is that r198 is "faster" (hearsay, I don't use it) which i take to mean it loads programs and compiles quicker. pdaxii13 has better multimedia capabilities (much better, I suspect) and fewer surprising quirks. I'm using ii13 simply because everything seems to work very nicely without a lot of fuss on my part.

[XorA]

I think the rxxx releases have been stable enough for me and only have some minor quirks, many of which are fixed by installing the service pack. Just about everything (No BVDD) works, and it doesn't crash for me, but YMMV.

Steal the patches from http://www.openembedded.org/filebrowser/or...s/mplayer/files for vo_pxa and you will have BVDD type functionality back on 2.6 kernel.

[Capn_Fish]

Does that need a kernel patch as well?

[scottlfa]

Would be nice to have bvdd like options.  Otherwise r198 does seem faster

[Meanie]

Does that need a kernel patch as well?

the kernel patches to support this were added in 2.6.22/2.6.23 timeframe

[Capn_Fish]

I assume they are or will be added to pdaXrom? This seems to be a fairly major issue with many people...

[scottlfa]

Looking forward to a more recent kernel, with bvdd or pxafb support

[plum]

I just hope that Next version will be Stable And with less bugs.....
(Poor english,Sorry……)

[scottlfa]

So far its very stable for me and reasonably fast.  Just want more media support -lol-.