Openbsd 5.4/zaurus Issues

[teh.sean]

I noticed that there's some activity on the forum around OpenBSD, and wanted to see if others had experienced the same thing I have.

I've got a SL-C3100.

Trying to play audio causes a kernel panic:
- I noticed that none of the typical /dev/audio or /dev/audioctl handles were created by default, so I ran
[div class=\'codetop\']CODE[/div][div class=\'codemain\' style=\'height:200px;white-space:pre;overflow:auto\']/dev/MAKEDEV[/div]
- Installed vorbis-tools from packages and attempted
[div class=\'codetop\']CODE[/div][div class=\'codemain\' style=\'height:200px;white-space:pre;overflow:auto\']ogg123 -d sndio -o dev:rsnd/1 (ogg file)[/div]
which took me to a ddb prompt.

Has anyone else had success playing sound with the Z?

Suspend / Hibernate are not working properly:
- Suspend causes LCD 'white out', but does not appear to power off. LCD backlight does not turn off automatically, or when the lid is closed. Also, the SD slot is detached at suspend and reattached at resume.
- Hibernate does nothing other than output
[div class=\'codetop\']CODE[/div][div class=\'codemain\' style=\'height:200px;white-space:pre;overflow:auto\']Hibernating system...[/div].

Has anyone else seen issues with suspend / hibernate on their SL-Cxx00?

Other than those issues, the Z runs OpenBSD just fine. The wifi card I had worked without issue and the SD driver works better than the native Cacko one did!

[ArchiMark]

I noticed that there's some activity on the forum around OpenBSD, and wanted to see if others had experienced the same thing I have.

I've got a SL-C3100.

Trying to play audio causes a kernel panic:
- I noticed that none of the typical /dev/audio or /dev/audioctl handles were created by default, so I ran
[div class=\'codetop\']CODE[/div][div class=\'codemain\' style=\'height:200px;white-space:pre;overflow:auto\']/dev/MAKEDEV[/div]
- Installed vorbis-tools from packages and attempted
[div class=\'codetop\']CODE[/div][div class=\'codemain\' style=\'height:200px;white-space:pre;overflow:auto\']ogg123 -d sndio -o dev:rsnd/1 (ogg file)[/div]
which took me to a ddb prompt.

Has anyone else had success playing sound with the Z?

Hi teh.sean, good to see that you're still around......

I haven't tried playing with sound yet....still trying to get a decent web browser built.....so far, no go....

Both trondd and I have decided that we need to move to 5.5 after it's released in about a week or so.....as we've been having issues with building some packages...

Suspend / Hibernate are not working properly:
- Suspend causes LCD 'white out', but does not appear to power off. LCD backlight does not turn off automatically, or when the lid is closed. Also, the SD slot is detached at suspend and reattached at resume.
- Hibernate does nothing other than output
[div class=\'codetop\']CODE[/div][div class=\'codemain\' style=\'height:200px;white-space:pre;overflow:auto\']Hibernating system...[/div].

Has anyone else seen issues with suspend / hibernate on their SL-Cxx00?

Other than those issues, the Z runs OpenBSD just fine. The wifi card I had worked without issue and the SD driver works better than the native Cacko one did!

Yes, there are issues with suspend/hibernate.....as I understand it, they're longstanding issues....

On my Z, the display goes dark after awhile and I can tap on it to wake it up...that works OK consistently...

Anyway, we're hoping that there will be some improvements with the upcoming 5.5......

[koan]

Although 5.5 isn't officially released yet; there seem to be 5.5 files in http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/zaurus/

I was just about to install these...

[TronDD]

Funny, I was trying to get sound going and noticed the devices weren't there.  I swore I had seen them before.

I'm just going to wait for 5.5 before putting too much more time into fiddling with things.

Regarding suspend, did you try enabling lid suspend in sysctl.conf?  That will turn off the backlight for me.  I don't think it actually does the suspend, though.   (on the other hand, if it did, it would eventually crash anyway)

You can try a 5.5 snapshot if you want.  I don't know exactly what code will be in there, though.  Close to what 5.5 final will be?  Or has it started to become 5.6 code?  Not sure.  The downside to going to 5.5 now is that there are no packages built (the generic arm packages will run on the Z).  I prefer to compile my own stuff (no rational reason for it, though.  I assume it's more optimized but no evidence that it is, or that it outweighs the time cost) but will use the package if I need to.  Nice to have the option.

Tim.

[ArchiMark]

Although 5.5 isn't officially released yet; there seem to be 5.5 files in http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/zaurus/

I was just about to install these...

Yes, that's the 'beta version' of 5.5.....I tried it at first before switching to 5.4....was working OK, but wanted to be on same version as TronDD, so, that we could share package builds....

But since 5.5 is supposed to be released on May 1st, only about a week away, you might as well wait for it....then install....

Funny, I was trying to get sound going and noticed the devices weren't there.  I swore I had seen them before.

I'm just going to wait for 5.5 before putting too much more time into fiddling with things.

Regarding suspend, did you try enabling lid suspend in sysctl.conf?  That will turn off the backlight for me.  I don't think it actually does the suspend, though.   (on the other hand, if it did, it would eventually crash anyway)

You can try a 5.5 snapshot if you want.  I don't know exactly what code will be in there, though.  Close to what 5.5 final will be?  Or has it started to become 5.6 code?  Not sure.  The downside to going to 5.5 now is that there are no packages built (the generic arm packages will run on the Z).  I prefer to compile my own stuff (no rational reason for it, though.  I assume it's more optimized but no evidence that it is, or that it outweighs the time cost) but will use the package if I need to.  Nice to have the option.

Tim.

Didn't know that the 'generic arm packages' will run on the z....by generic do you mean all the libs, etc? or including the programs such as browsers, etc?......

[teh.sean]

I'm just going to wait for 5.5 before putting too much more time into fiddling with things.

That's probably a good idea. I can wait a week, and I prefer running on -release unless there's a gotta have feature in snapshots.

Regarding suspend, did you try enabling lid suspend in sysctl.conf?  That will turn off the backlight for me.  I don't think it actually does the suspend, though.   (on the other hand, if it did, it would eventually crash anyway)

I did not try using machdep.lidsuspend. Historically, OpenBSD had issues with suspend / hibernate with the Zaurus around 4.0 but I thought that was at one point resolved. There's a thread [a href=\'index.php?showtopic=19506\']here (Suspend Crashes)[/a] that mentions all this.

I prefer to compile my own stuff (no rational reason for it, though.  I assume it's more optimized but no evidence that it is, or that it outweighs the time cost) but will use the package if I need to.  Nice to have the option.

Tim.

I might be able to wait a week for a new rev, but I don't have the patience to wait for packages to build! I'll gladly take the packages available, and just cope with whatever overhead I lose for non optimized builds.

[teh.sean]

Didn't know that the 'generic arm packages' will run on the z....by generic do you mean all the libs, etc? or including the programs such as browsers, etc?......

Hey Mark! Long time no see.

To answer your question, Yes; the generic arm packages, including libraries should work with the Z. So if you attempt to install dillo for example, any of the packages it needs as a prerequisite SHOULD work from the same 'armish' package tree.

From the OpenBSD site:

http://www.openbsd.org/zaurus.html[/url] ']Since the Zaurus is a fully capable machine, we no longer cross compile. All builds of Zaurus are done on the Zaurus directly. (The shared "arm" packages are nowadays built on the armish platform, because it is faster.)

And from the installation notes:

http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapsho.../INSTALL.zaurus[/url] ']Installing applications from the ftp.OpenBSD.org package collection:

   All available packages for your architecture have been placed on
   ftp.OpenBSD.org in the directory pub/OpenBSD/5.5/packages/arm/
   You may want to peruse this to see what packages are available.  The
   packages are also on the OpenBSD FTP mirror sites.

Hah, apparently the site is slowly making its way from 5.4 to 5.5!

[ArchiMark]

Didn't know that the 'generic arm packages' will run on the z....by generic do you mean all the libs, etc? or including the programs such as browsers, etc?......

Hey Mark! Long time no see.

To answer your question, Yes; the generic arm packages, including libraries should work with the Z. So if you attempt to install dillo for example, any of the packages it needs as a prerequisite SHOULD work from the same 'armish' package tree.

From the OpenBSD site:

Installing applications from the ftp.OpenBSD.org package collection:

   All available packages for your architecture have been placed on
   ftp.OpenBSD.org in the directory pub/OpenBSD/5.5/packages/arm/
   You may want to peruse this to see what packages are available.  The
   packages are also on the OpenBSD FTP mirror sites.

Hah, apparently the site is slowly making its way from 5.4 to 5.5!

Hi Sean,

Glad to have you around.....the more the merrier!.....

Thanks for the clarification about arm packages....so, while it's great that the libs, etc, are usable, we still have to build packages for the programs we want to use such as browsers, office type programs, etc....which takes time.....

[teh.sean]

Thanks for the clarification about arm packages....so, while it's great that the libs, etc, are usable, we still have to build packages for the programs we want to use such as browsers, office type programs, etc....which takes time.....

Sorry, I may have caused confusion. If the application package (not just libraries) already exists in the ftp repository, you can install it. For example, there's a dillo package in the repo: dillo-3.0.3.tgz

IMO, the only time you'd want to build a package from source would be

• If a package does not exist
• If the package source version is old, and there are newer features available
• You want to pass in some compiler arguments for optimization
• The package source is . . . . questionable.

[teh.sean]

Funny, I was trying to get sound going and noticed the devices weren't there.  I swore I had seen them before.

I'm just going to wait for 5.5 before putting too much more time into fiddling with things.

Found this in the release notes:

http://www.openbsd.org/plus55.html[/url] ']

• Re-added audio devices to the zaurus.
• Fixed ztsscale(8/zaurus) after struct wscons_event size change.
• Lock the audio mutex before invoking the audio(4) call-back. Fixes panics on zaurus.

Looks like some fixes for sound issues. Rockin!

[ArchiMark]

Thanks for clarifying again, Sean....

5.5 definitely sounds better.....hopefully we'll have official release very soon....

[teh.sean]

Alright, I loaded OpenBSD 5.5 today and here's what I've found:

• The Good:
  • Audio playback works without issue
• The Bad:
  • None of the apm suspend / hibernate / standby modes work properly as far as I can tell
• The Ugly:
  • Using machdep.lidsuspend=1 seems to work, putting the Z into standby, but powering back up results in a black screen. I have a workaround below.

I had hoped that the sound performance would be better; as is, decoding 112kHz streaming OGG is just barely outside of the reach of the Zaurus. Even with the processor max speed set to 520, CPU utilization is pegged at 100% while running ogg123. Playing around with the sndiod audio rate didn't seem to help, though I know little to nothing about sound in UNIX-likes.



In the default OpenBSD shell, ksh, keys combinations can be bound to commands. Check the link here:StackExchange : Adding Ctrl-L as “clear” hotkey in OpenBSD's ksh

The suspend backlight screen fix I used has a few steps:
[div class=\'codetop\']CODE[/div][div class=\'codemain\' style=\'height:200px;white-space:pre;overflow:auto\']
echo wsconsctl display.backlight=100 > /home/screenfix.sh
chmod 0755 /home/screenfix.sh
echo bind -m '^H'=/home/screenfix.sh'^J' >>~/.profile
[/div]
Log out of the shell and log back in, close the lid, open and hit CTRL+H. Seems to work for me. If you want to see what binds are already set, just enter 'bind' at the shell for a list.

If you're in X when you suspend, I feel bad for you son. . . . I got 99 problems but this glitch ain't one.

[ArchiMark]

Thanks for the update, Sean.....

Somehow, not surprised about suspend related issues....as it's been a longstanding issue....and have sense that there's really not much developer interest in the Zaurus anymore.....gee, wonder why?.....  

But at least they include us in the releases...guess that's something.....

Tim (TronDD) has already installed it too, but he said that it looks like arm webkit is not fixed....    
Can you check this?.......

Let us know if you  find any other good or bad points about 5.5....

My concern is whether I can find or build a good web browser....ie, something a bit more modern than links, dillo, etc......

[TronDD]

Are you able to run X in 5.5?  Did you install fresh or upgrade?

X crashes for me but it might be my Zaurus.

Tim.