Completely removing Sharp ROM?

[bojo]

I recieved my new SL5600 on Friday last week, and after tinkering around with the default OS I naturally went on to flash it with OZ.  After applying the various fixes to get things working right, I definately liked what I saw, except for the fact that /dev/mtdblock3 was unwritable.  That\'s too much free space to be giving up, I thought to myself.

Over the course of the weekend, I flashed back to the Sharp ROM, but much to my suprise noticed that all the apps/files/notes I had made were still intact.  That struck me as extremely odd, as I had thought that the ROM would have been overwritten by OZ.

More experimenting led me to believe that the Format option under the maintenance menu did absolute nothing.  No matter how many times I used it, it never went back to a \'factory level install\'.  I also attempted reflashing several times in a an attempt to get a factory build.

Here is where I probably made a mistake, although if it is a mistake I think it should be correctable.  I deleted all the contents of the /home directory (/dev/mtdblock3), then attempted to Format/Update my unit.  Curiosity gets me into trouble as usual, and after the kernel booted the system would never come back up.

Fast forward to now.  I have installed the OZ ROM, and it works as I had assumed it would.  I am under the impression that whatever pieces of the Sharp ROM are floating around will still remain there, using up valuable memory I could be devoting to OZ.  This seems very annoying to me, but I am also assuming that I may have done something wrong along the way (besides the obvious).  Is there a way to completely remove the Sharp ROM, or for that matter completely replace what I have broken?  If not, this would seem like a serious design flaw.

Overall I like what I have seen so far, so I\'ll keep tinkering with this over the rest of the week.  Thanks for any input.

[catachresis]

Have you made any progress in getting rid of those old Sharp directories?

[bojo]

Have you made any progress in getting rid of those old Sharp directories?

After a little searching around I finally figured out what OZ does.  The Sharp ROM stores most of your independant application and file data in /home (located on /dev/mtdblock3), so by actually removing all that I wasn\'t really harming anything except my own data and a partial chunk of the Sharp ROM filesystem.  I also believe that I was referencing said partition through the OZ package manager incorrectly (I couldn\'t seem to write to it my first couple experiments), thus leading me to believe that I had either installed OZ wrong, or that Sharp kept pieces of itself around for a reason.

I now have a working install of OZ again, but this time I am armed with a more thorough knowledge of how it is laid out on the disk.  The initial install goes to the first 32mb partition as the root / partition, and /home goes on the other 32mb partition.

What threw me off when I was trying to reflash the Sharp ROM was the fact that it kept retaining all my data (located on the untouched /home partition).  This in itself is disturbing however, since I would expect the Format option in the maintenance window to literally wipe the unit clean, or OZ to delete the data.  I have come to find out, however, that OZ never touches the /home partition when you install, and I still haven\'t figured out why Format doesn\'t actually wipe the unit.

The only thing that is still bugging me right now though, is the fact that I cannot get a Sharp ROM reflashed correctly.  Now that I have a working installation (and again, knowledge) of what OZ does on the other hand, I\'m not as interested in getting that working since the only issue was my head

[nhershey]

Out of curiosity, which version of OZ did you use successfully with your 5600?  Thanks.

[catachresis]

Hey Bojo, thanks for the verbose explanation (I\'ll bookmark this response).  I\'ll second nhershey\'s question about which version of OZ you\'re using.  What are the chances you\'d jot down your reflections on installing OZ (with your improved understanding of the process) in a sequential order for me and others to reflect on when we do future OZ installs on the 5600?  Thanks again.

[bojo]

Hey guys,

I\'ve installed both 3.3.5, and 3.3.6-pre1.  There are a few quirks right now, such as the screen bumping and clock reset on reboot, but beyond that I have been extremely satisfied so far.  I am running 3.3.6-pre1 at the moment.

The process of installation boiled down to:

Drop the initrd.bin, zImage, updater.sh files onto a cf card.
Remove battery cover, hit reset, replace cover.
Plug in AC.
While holding down the OK button, power system on.
Select the Update function from the maintenance menu.
Select CF card option, say Yes.
After it says installation complete, turn off unit, remove battery cover, hit reset, replace.

The system will boot into Opie, and ask you a few questions about time and whatnot.
Skip those steps!  Just accept what is there for the moment, and get Opie booted.
Go to the Application tab, and open Konsole.
Type:  echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/printk
(The above step removes the screen bumping issue).
Edit /etc/init.d/opie and around line 42 add the above echo line.

After this, change your system appearance to taste (I prefer 8 point font, more readable), and set your system time.  Just keep in mind that anytime you do an actual soft reboot the time will reset (haven\'t found any fixes for this yet).

From here on out things have been a snap for me.  I cleared out the /home directory, which had a bunch of old and redundant Sharp ROM information that was wasting space.  I the mapped /home in the Packages utility as a drive in which to install to (the root partition was down to 500kb of space), and then removed packages I felt comfortable removing from the system using the Package utility bringing me up to 1.3mb of free root partition space.

My AmbiCom WL1100C-CF wifi card works out of the box, mostly.
 
Stop/Restart the service from the Network menu (I chose the Auto mode in the Configure tab for the wlan0 device as well).  If a network is in the area it will load it up, (and I am assuming you can specify the SSID of a network otherwise).  The WEP keys work fine as well.
The annoying wifi steps I have to do to get the network gateway running (from Konsole) are:
udhcpc -i wlan0
route add -net default gw 192.168.0.1 netmask 0.0.0.0 metric 1 wlan0

I wrote a quick bash script (in a meeting no less, hurrah) to make the above a little easier.  I\'ll tweak it more a little later to automatically set my gateway based on the discovered network instead of manually typing it, but the following works for now:

Code: [Select]

#!/bin/sh

udhcpc -i wlan0

route add -net default gw $1 netmask 0.0.0.0 metric 1 wlan0

Just chmod +x the file, and call it as ./file.sh <wireless_gateway_ip>

I\'m sure there\'s an easier way, but this is what I have been doing.

I can\'t take full credit for any of the above, I found this link which gave me several hints.

From here on out, I\'ve been using it for daily routines.  Calendaring, notes, eBooks, etc.  The battery life has been exceptional, and even tinkering with the wifi card all day (on and off) dropped it down to 50% by the time I got home.

Today I\'ve been trying to find some way to get X11 running on the unit.  I\'m not inclined to start making any of my own builds though, so I\'ll just continue to hunt down projects and try them out for the time being.

[erich141]

The annoying wifi steps I have to do to get the network gateway running (from Konsole) are:
udhcpc -i wlan0
route add -net default gw 192.168.0.1 netmask 0.0.0.0 metric 1 wlan0

I wrote a quick bash script (in a meeting no less, hurrah) to make the above a little easier.  I\'ll tweak it more a little later to automatically set my gateway based on the discovered network instead of manually typing it, but the following works for now:

Code: [Select]

#!/bin/sh

udhcpc -i wlan0

route add -net default gw $1 netmask 0.0.0.0 metric 1 wlan0

Just chmod +x the file, and call it as ./file.sh <wireless_gateway_ip>

I\'m sure there\'s an easier way, but this is what I have been doing.

An easier way it to open a file /usr/share/udhcpc/default.script in vi and insert the following line into the beginning:
\"export PATH=/sbin:$PATH\"

For some reason /sbin is not in it\'s default PATH and it can\'t find \"route\".

[catachresis]

Bojo, you rock!  That\'s a great thumb-nail howto.  Your instructions (and assurances) are well-appreciated.