Converting C-860 to English myself - possible?

[Anonymous]

Hi!

I am considering getting a Zaurus, either the C-860 or the 6000L. I am waiting for Ian on Bargainpda.com\'s review of the 6000L to finally decide.

I was hoping to get some insight from the Zaurus-guru\'s in this forum. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Below are my questions:

1.) I live in South Africa and buying a C-860 from Dynamism.com or shirtpocket.co.uk will be extremely expensive because of shipping costs etc.  :cry: I can get a C-860 directly from Japan. I want to know how difficult it would be to convert it to English myself? Has anybody done this yet? Any pitfalls etc. that you could mention? Maybe just install the OpenZaurus or Cacko ROM\'s?

2.) To get \"normal\" Linux programs running on the Zaurus, do you first have to recompile them for the Zaurus. Is this difficult?

3.) I have seen Gentoo for the Zaurus, anybody tried it?

That\'s about it for now, thanks for any help!!

Cheers!  

[omega]

Hi,

i am in the process of buying a c860 privately - it\'s the choice of the two! keyboard much more usable, 3.5mm socket (standard) instead of 2.5 mm on the 6000, battery life is better. okay the screen on the 6000 is 0.3\" bigger - big deal... There are many guides around for converting to english yourself, with screenshots guiding you through the japanese screens. It seems to be very quick and painless, and there is also a script to do it all for you. just search. and enjoy!

[Anonymous]

Thanks Omega!

I have been browsing the web and found some Tutorials on changing the Japanese to English. Like you said, it doesn\'t seem too difficult at all?    

The size of the 6000 just puts me off, but it has SDIO - nice.

I am looking for a Bluetooth CF card to go with the C860, do you kknow of any that workds with the C860 and doesn\'t stick out of the devide(i.e. is flush against the casing)?

Thanks for your feedback!  

[Stubear]

Basically when you convert to English you have 2 chioces - go all the way or keep some Japanese support.

If you want to get rid of Japanese completely then the easiest and fastest way is to flash one of the roms you will hear about here. The best at the moment (actually the only actively developed rom) is the Cacko 1.21 rom. It comes with very easy to follow instructions and is a piece of cake to install - following that you have a completely English zaurus with some handy apps pre installed.

If you want to keep Japanese support but have your menus in English then you can follow a number of guides here and on the net (NOTE: read the FAQ it very helpful - especially if you are new to linux too) or you can use my conversion script (available here NOTE: designed and tested on the Cxx0 models - not sure if anyone has even treied it on the 6000, but the idea behind the script is will be the same - hide/remove all *qm files to force qtopia to use default English - comment out the Japanese names in all .desktop files so that qtopia displays the English name.

Stu

[Anonymous]

Converting a C-860 to English is quite straightforward and not so difficult.

The only sort of pitfall that I encountered was making up my mind as to what precisely I wanted the Zaurus to do afterwards. You need to decide whether you want PDA or a small general computer. If you mainly want a PDA you can simply keep Sharp\'s applications and give them English texts. Make a backup first.

If you want to explore the IT aspects of the Zaurus you can switch to Qtopia or the new pdaxrom linux with corresponding SDK.

Simply giving the Sharp applications English text requires no special skills.

[lardman]

1.) I live in South Africa and buying a C-860 from Dynamism.com or shirtpocket.co.uk will be extremely expensive because of shipping costs etc. I can get a C-860 directly from Japan. I want to know how difficult it would be to convert it to English myself? Has anybody done this yet? Any pitfalls etc. that you could mention? Maybe just install the OpenZaurus or Cacko ROM\'s?

Take a look at www.japan-direct.com, this was the cheapest way for me (and it was pretty cheap it has to be said). Mine came with a Japanese ROM, I immediately flashed to pdaXrom and am now using OZ. No problem with this method IMHO.

2.) To get \"normal\" Linux programs running on the Zaurus, do you first have to recompile them for the Zaurus. Is this difficult?

Yes you do have to recompile them, how difficult it is depends on the program. Command line stuff is generally childishly simple to do, but if you have to port from Qt/X11 to Qt/Embedded it will probably be a bit more work. Porting from Gnome will be lots more work. Note that the above applied to the Qtopia based ROMs (OZ, Cacko), if you use the X11 ROM it\'s probably just about as easy to do GUI apps as it is to do command line stuff.


Si

[Anonymous]

Hi Stubear/Talyinka/Lardman

Thanks a lot for all the help! Seems like I\'ll be getting a Japanese C860 and install either Cacko or the X11 ROM. X11 sounds good and the fact that an SDK is available(had a look at the website) sounds interesting for porting apps. I would like to do some Perl and shell scripting among other things.  

The help from this forum really is invaluable.

Thanks again guys!! I will probably bother everybody with more questions soon enough......