How To: Restore Your Netwalker Pc-z1

[Teamoth]

Brilliant! Thank you, I'll start downloading that now!

Hi, any luck in recovering your Netwalker? Just curious...

Varti

Hi Varti, yes I have had some luck just this evening! I'd been trying on and off when I got a chance (we've got a 3 week old baby!) and so far it hadn't worked until this evening. The problem was with using dd terminal commands to put the image file on the microsd. I must of tried it a dozen times and looked at a dozen dd command webpages for advice, but the image that would be copied to the sd card never worked when I booted. This evening I tried some software called Etcher (https://etcher.io/) to put the image on the sd and this time it worked when I booted the Netwalker. So I've finally managed to restore it, which is great. Looks like there may be some other issue with the wifi not working, but thankfully web usage wasn't my reason for getting it. Thanks again for your help on this!

[Teamoth]

Correction, wifi is now working! The problem was just my own buffoonery. Now to try and get Sunvox working, which involves me hassling people on another forum...

[Varti]

Hi Varti, yes I have had some luck just this evening! I'd been trying on and off when I got a chance (we've got a 3 week old baby!) and so far it hadn't worked until this evening.

Congratulations! And I know what it means to have little free time, I have myself a 4 years, a 3 years and an 11 months old children
Glad that you sorted out your wifi problems as well. It would be nice to have the restore pack stored somewhere so that we don't have to rely on archive.org, too bad about the filesize though.

Varti

[Varti]

Now to try and get Sunvox working, which involves me hassling people on another forum...

I have never tried Sunvox, but it looks like an interesting tracker! Coincidentally, some other user here has already asked for a port of Sunvox on warmplace.ru for the Zaurus, which is basically Netwalker's predecessor, I'd love to see that port too.

Varti

[Teamoth]

Now to try and get Sunvox working, which involves me hassling people on another forum...

I have never tried Sunvox, but it looks like an interesting tracker! Coincidentally, some other user here has already asked for a port of Sunvox on warmplace.ru for the Zaurus, which is basically Netwalker's predecessor, I'd love to see that port too.

Varti

Sunvox is simply my favourite bit of software ever. I've been using it regularly since 2009 on many platforms (Palm OS, Windows, Winmobile/CE, Android, iOS...). My favourite portable device was a Jornada 720, as having a physical qwerty keyboard allows you to play the keys kinda like piano keys! Great for making up little tunes/loops when on public transport etc. I loved the immediateness of the embedded WinMo/CE flavour software it ran (no waiting for start up), but in the end it was just too underpowered and I've been on a quest for a more recent replacement for sometime. As much as I'm enjoying the Netwalker I've not yet got Sunvox working on it and the Ubuntu it's running is really, really slow. If the Netwalker is to become the Jornada 720 replacement I'm going to have to learn about compiling Linux images and put a much lighter OS on it and it's finding the time at the moment!

[Varti]

Sunvox is simply my favourite bit of software ever. I've been using it regularly since 2009 on many platforms (Palm OS, Windows, Winmobile/CE, Android, iOS...). My favourite portable device was a Jornada 720, as having a physical qwerty keyboard allows you to play the keys kinda like piano keys! Great for making up little tunes/loops when on public transport etc. I loved the immediateness of the embedded WinMo/CE flavour software it ran (no waiting for start up), but in the end it was just too underpowered and I've been on a quest for a more recent replacement for sometime. As much as I'm enjoying the Netwalker I've not yet got Sunvox working on it and the Ubuntu it's running is really, really slow. If the Netwalker is to become the Jornada 720 replacement I'm going to have to learn about compiling Linux images and put a much lighter OS on it and it's finding the time at the moment!

I have used Milkytracker on the Zaurus in the past, but Sunvox seems like better suited for a handheld device.
You're not the only one complaining that Linux is slow on the Netwalker, unfortunately: https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showforum=166 . Sunvox' author has recently expressed interest in porting it to Zaurus; if at the end a port will surface for Arch Linux and SDL on framebuffer (the most likely target on Zaurus), it might be interesting to try to run it on the same setup on the Netwalker; without the window manager overhead it might run well.

Varti

[Teamoth]

Hi Varti, I've seen the thread over on the Sunvox forum now about a Zaurus port and your post. Yeah if Alex does release a Zaurus port that might be a good option for the Netwalker if I can't get one of the existing versions to work. I've heard Milky Tracker mentioned many times, but I've not played with it yet.

Netwalker-wise everything has ground to a halt until I can find more time to figure out how to compile a nice lightweight Linux Kernel image that will work better on it. It's a shame that the Netwalker wasn't more widely distributed, as there'd probably be more people sharing image files out there.

So the jury is still out as to whether the Netwalker is going to be my new pocket Sunvox computer... I may end up selling it and looking for a simpler more immediate solution that doesn’t require so much head scratching.

[Varti]

The Netwalker was officially sold by Zaurus on the japanese market only, it was imported to the rest of the world only via the grey market, so I believe that most of the activity was on japanese forums, which of course is of no use unless you have a good enough knowledge of the language...

About the alternatives to a Netwalker, a couple of people here have bought a new GPD clamshell, which is even smaller: https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=34424
On the plus side, it is available now, it's a new device with good specs, it has an Atom CPU which means that x64 Linux distros and programs should run on it with only minor tweaks required, hence Sunvox should run too. On the other side, officially it runs only Windows 10 and it is still not known how well will Linux run on it, plus the Atom CPU has been discontinued by Intel and sooner or later they'll stop producing them, so the GPD Win will be discontinued as well. If you don't mind running Sunvox under Windows though, you can probably have it already running from the start.

Varti