pdaXrom fears and worries...

[padishah_emperor]

I am getting an 860 this week, is it seriously worth doing this, I flashed my 5500 over and over without any worries, but this NAND backup stuff scares me and I fear I may brick 600 quid\'s worth of toy.

How much space does pdaxrom take?  What actually gets installed? How useable is the final result?

Do I need storage cards for this?  I have 128MB MMC and 512MB CF, plus 32 and 64 CF cards for misc use.

Are there any screenshots beyond those on the cacko site that anyone knows of? Or reviews?

I\'ve trawled the net and couldn\'t find all the answers, so any flame-less help is appreciated.

..or could X/Qt provide my X needs? Is there any compatibility in the .ipk packages between X/qt and pdaXrom?

[ScottYelich]

it really depends on what you want -- remember, the pdaxrom is a work in progress... if you want full pda and stuff that\'s been
polished, stay with another rom.  Me, personally, I want a mini workstation.  pocketworkstation is nice -- but pdaxrom has
the same, if not far more potential and immediate usabiility.

how much space?  all of it.  :-]  Although, I did move /usr/local to /home/local and then ln -s /home/local /usr/local -- that seems
to help.  I also installed firefox, gimp and other large[r] programs to sd.

do you need storage cards? no.  would they help -- yes... install firefox to sd... then when you reflash the latest pdaxrom,
you can just ipkg-link mount /mnt/card and your firefox is back, etc.  you can always uninstall it fmo there if a new version
is compiled, etc.

I haven\'t made screenshots, although I really want to open up each app and take some shots, perhaps I\'ll do that tonight.

X/qt is something... but pdaxrom is x based.  it\'s designed with X in mind from the start.

Scott
ps: it gets more usable by the day -- and with the new SDK coming out -- it should really explode.

[Laze]

Just a quick teaser - i just installed the SDK (demo version for me specially) and followed the turtorial (yes there is a small how-to-compile turtorial) and got the example program to compile and also made a small SDL program without any problems. Its great and easy to use.. The SDK for release is almost 100% done.

[anonuk]

I tried the pdaXrom but found XQt to be better for my needs, i use it in two ways - firstly as Xqt server/client using programs from the feed (and some others) - generally i use it for gimp & sylpheed.

I use it far more with pocketworkstation in Xqt - running off the SD card, so i have all my qtopia apps plus the full debian on sd accessible inside qtopia...

thats the solution i have found best for my needs as i use the pda/qtopia stuff a lot but really like running x on the Z for apps like gimp, sylpheed and hopefully soon abiword (as soon as i get my new SD card, 128Mb isnt really enough for pocketworkstation and apt-get :-))

also the xqt/pocketworkstation can access my lan/dsl through the qtopia network settings which is really useful for my lame network card.

[ScottYelich]

I used 512mb for pocketworkstation .. and I filled that up. :-<

easily.

quickly.

[padishah_emperor]

OK thanks, I\'m still not sure and I\'m not feeling good about the risk of turning my new 860 into a brick, or (by what I read) overclocking to make pdaXrom work well.  

I get the feeling that all that lovely storage space which has cost so much money will be filled in the blink of an eye.  Another thing that springs to mind is, for me at least, running X in anything smaller than 1024x768 is just too tight a squeeze, esp. on a tiny 640x480 display, don\'t think my eyes will be up to the job.

I would be interested to know more about X/Qt, I will start a new thread in the right place (if I can find it).

[ChrisEBoy]

pdaXrom, is fast.  The only thing the overclocking is good for is firefox, you know the full desktop mozilla.  Dillo runs lightning fast on the pda, and let\'s face it browsing for extended periods on a tiny vga screen isn\'t good.  X is fine on a small screen, it\'s just the apps you use that make the difference.  Qtopia apps are designed to run on a small screen and so \"work\" well.  The X apps, in general, aren\'t.

Speaking as a developer and one who likes the idea of carrying a tiny workstation around with him, pdaxrom is great.  It\'s small enough not to require great resources but it\'s still very fast.  The only thing I miss is a nice address book app, kopi is great but that\'s missing.  I\'ve tried X/Qt and found it almost unbearably slow.

Don\'t worry (too much) about bricking the z, I\'ve swapped a couple of roms and only the first one was a problem.  I\'m almost to the stage of not being scared about it :-)

[pakman]

OK thanks, I\'m still not sure and I\'m not feeling good about the risk of turning my new 860 into a brick

Yes, bricking a Z with a NAND restore is a real worry. IMHO the real problem is that there is no way of testing a NAND backup for integrity other than by doing the restore. This is why this stuff is in a service menu, and not an end-user supported option like flashing the ROM.

There is a suggestion on the Externe forums here that the problems arise from fragmentation, and you can increase your chances of success with a NAND restore by using freshly-formatted memory cards throughout.

My way of dealing with the NAND restore worries is not do do it. If you try pdaxrom and then decide that you don\'t like it and want to go back to a Qtopia-based solution, flash to the Cacko Qtopia ROM or the tkcROM instead, rather than trying to go back to the Sharp ROM. This way you will never have to do a NAND restore. Use the standard Unix \'tar\' utility to backup your data from before the flash and restore it afterwards.

Regards,
P.

[zbones]

Isn\'t it supposed to be safer flashing a cxx0 device?

There are more get you working fixes, nand restore, and then if that fails you have the recovery package.

These didn\'t exist on the 5500.

A friend flashed an sl5500 kernel onto his c750, we managed to recovery it very quickly and easily.

They are more expensive, so I guess that makes you more nervous.

[padishah_emperor]

Yeah, you\'re right. My 860 will be here by midday, give it a week and I will probably try a new ROM, pakman has a point, I won\'t bother with a restore, I will just flash a new ROM each time.

Thanks everyone