moving /home to /mnt/cf/home ?

[Tyris]

I just got my 6000 yesterday -- I\'ve been without a PDA since my Casio E100 days long ago. Im blown away by the capabilities of this thing, wireless networking worked first try. I\'ve got smbmount mounting my mp3\'s from my linux desktop. this thing is unbelievable.

I did have a few issues:

Im trying to reduce the wear and tear on internal flash by moving everything offboard.
Has anyone tried moving /home or /home/zaurus to /mnt/cf/ via a symlink?

I did a cp -a /home/zaurus to my cf card (formated vfat) then symlinked it back to /home. Unfortunately none of my address or calendar entries were visible until I undid the changes.

Also, does anyone know if tkcMail works on the 6000? seems the built in mail client lacks pop3-ssl. Also, any suggestions for a decent mp3 player. I dont mind the standard one except the lack of any fast-forward, rewind within a track (alot of my mp3\'s are 80+ minutes). The ipk from killefiz.de for xmms didnt install - not sure if Im missing something.

any help is greatly appreciated!

-T

[padishah_emperor]

I have a C860 running Cacko QT ROM, it has the 6000\'s media player and seems to fast forward / reverse fine, I use it all the time no problem.  To move your home to SD or CF, the card would have to be in ext2 format or a filesystem which can support symlinks etc, but that may not be practical for you.  I used to move my /home/zaurus and /tmp to (a big) SD card when I had a 5500, no real issues that I can remember, except ext2 on flash memory seems slow..

I\'m so glad you like your new Z, I hope it brings you much pleasure. I am still overjoyed with mine.

[Tyris]

Thanks for the tip! I\'ll reformat the CF card to ext2 and give it a try.

Im still perplexed about mediaplayer - I put the stylus on the slider and try to move it,  but it has no effect. I haven\'t find any keyboard shortcuts to move it either. Oh well.

I take it none of the alternate roms work with the 6000?

-T

[padishah_emperor]

Thanks for the tip! I\'ll reformat the CF card to ext2 and give it a try.  

Im still perplexed about mediaplayer - I put the stylus on the slider and try to move it,  but it has no effect. I haven\'t find any keyboard shortcuts to move it either. Oh well.

My machine has a jog-wheel which does it by default, but I re-assign it as a volume control.  The Zaurus remote should work, check the Conics website, I\'ve only just discovered it, and am definately getting one.

I take it none of the alternate roms work with the 6000?

-T

Not yet, give them a bit of time, I imagine pdaXrom will even be ported. It depends on the developers getting access to the machines, I know some developers will prefer the C series because of the form factor, but Sharp has released the 6000\'s source code so new ROMs will come in the near future :-)

You will find, as I have with both Z I\'ve had, they are like fine wine, they improve with time. ;-)

BTW, ext2 will be slow, 10 times slower on my Z also if you have or use the USB drive feature on your machine, a ext2 formatted disk will not be usable on a Windows PC without additional drivers, I can\'t help on that.

[padishah_emperor]

The drag bar BTW is more like an indicator, you can\'t drag it.
:-)

[Ethereal]

ext2 will be slow, 10 times slower on my Z

Has anyone tried formatting an SD card jffs2?  If so, does this help with the problem, since the Z uses jffs2 for its own internal filesystems?

[padishah_emperor]

Has anyone tried formatting an SD card jffs2?  If so, does this help with the problem, since the Z uses jffs2 for its own internal filesystems?

Oddly enough I have **just** been looking into that :shock: , but I don\'t have mkfs.jffs2, surely it must work on SD/MMC!?!?  Cant find much info.  :?

[Tyris]

Clearly there are lots of options here.

Shame about the \"drag bar\"   Seems we\'re left with an mp3 player that cant FF or RW.

I guess I\'ll wait until a pdaXrom is built for the 6000 - from there xmms,  firebird/firefox should be good to go. I\'d love to use Thunderbird as my email client, but its not avail yet, I need something with ssl support.  

Is it possible to run X apps under Qt?

Regarding jffs2 - I found this on google from one of the zaurus mailing lists:

Unfortunatelly it won\'t help you much, as only mtd (memory technology device)
can be mounted with jffs2, that is the builtin flash rom - this is my  
understanding of the problem.
Even if I am wrong with that, it didn\'t work for me when I tried, I couldn\'t  
mount my filesystem.

BTW, ext2 will be slow, 10 times slower on my Z also if you have or use the USB drive feature on your machine, a ext2 formatted disk will not be usable on a Windows PC without additional drivers, I can\'t help on that.

Thankfully I\'ve been windows free since \'98, so I can maniplate ext2 but it may not be worth it if takes a 10x hit in performance. Im curious to see how the jffs2 experiment plays out.

-T

[padishah_emperor]

Hi Tyris, hope you\'re still having joy with your mighty Z, we are both Win-Free people, I couldn\'t imagine running Windows ever again. I\'m actually a sys engineer with degrees and a doctorate in computer engineering, been in computers all my life starting on PDP/DRS-20 and VAX systems, yet I got totally pissed off with I.T. just because of -having- to run that bag-o-crap every day.. ugh, going into forestry/conservation - complete turn-around ;-)

My jffs2 plan did not work, couldn\'t find enough info/tools for the job.

I got confused (frequent event with my erratic brain) with the C-series Music Player, there is no such thing on the old media player/6000 media player. Odd. Even more odd, I\'d never noticed!!

X apps do work on Qtopia, I run X/QT - your milage may vary on a 6000. I only use it for xterms and the highly revered GIMP.

pdaXrom I was not overly impressed with because I like Qtopia, it\'s quick, plus X is tiny on the screen without electron microscope eyes it can be problematic, also the entire internal flash is rw, I am wanting to minimise wear in the internal memory, I don\'t mind wearing out replaceable memory - not internal.

Hunt about, xmms should be available for Qtopia, or if you get X/Qt on a 6000, try it under X, I think xmms is in the X/Qt feed.

There ARE lot\'s of options, think of a Z as a blank canvas, you are limited only by your imagination really.

I have a 64MB MMC and 512MB CF, I\'m going to move my home to CF, I may partition it so I can copy music/data quickly to FAT. I will post any positive results. 100,000 rewrites may sound a lot, but I err on the side of caution.

:-)

[DrWowe]

Has anyone tried formatting an SD card jffs2?  If so, does this help with the problem, since the Z uses jffs2 for its own internal filesystems?

It can be done, but first you\'ll need the blkmtd kernel module.   This is because jffs2 doesn\'t work on ordinary block devices, it only works on mtd devices.  blkmtd bridges the gap by emulating the mtd interface on top of a block device.

[Ethereal]

It can be done, but first you\'ll need the blkmtd kernel module.

Anyone know where to find it?

[DrWowe]

I\'ve looked - I can\'t find a Zaurus binary.  It\'s included in the Linux kernel source, so anyone with a working cross compiler and kernel build environment could easily make it.

[rayjward]

Also, does anyone know if tkcMail works on the 6000? seems the built in mail client lacks pop3-ssl.  
-T

In case you have not had a chance to try yet, tckMail does work.  I have not tried the imap beta but the regular one works quite well.
-r

[Tyris]

Hi Tyris, hope you\'re still having joy with your mighty Z, we are both Win-Free people, I couldn\'t imagine running Windows ever again. I\'m actually a sys engineer with degrees and a doctorate in computer engineering, been in computers all my life starting on PDP/DRS-20 and VAX systems, yet I got totally pissed off with I.T. just because of -having- to run that bag-o-crap every day.. ugh, going into forestry/conservation - complete turn-around ;-)

I love the Z-sl6000, I take it to work where it helps keep me organized and serves as a full time MP3 player. At home it sees regular use when my wife confisctates my linux laptop! I\'ve got her using XFce on Mandrake

I gave up windows before graduate school; it felt like the computing equivalent of wearing handcuffs. It\'s certainly not the OS for tinkerers, and these days with the rash of worms and email trojans I fail to see how it earns its keep for business users. I have been fortunate at work, as all of our developement and validation environments use linux (I work on x86 processor design). We do still keep windows laptops around for email and presentations.

My jffs2 plan did not work, couldn\'t find enough info/tools for the job.

Ahh well, Im going to follow your lead and move /home onto external flash on ext2

X apps do work on Qtopia, I run X/QT - your milage may vary on a 6000. I only use it for xterms and the highly revered GIMP.

I\'ve been reading about X/QT and will give it a try shortly if I cant find a usable xmms for QT.

Hunt about, xmms should be available for Qtopia, or if you get X/Qt on a 6000, try it under X, I think xmms is in the X/Qt feed.

I have a 64MB MMC and 512MB CF, I\'m going to move my home to CF, I may partition it so I can copy music/data quickly to FAT. I will post any positive results. 100,000 rewrites may sound a lot, but I err on the side of caution.

Aye, I\'ll look for a working XMMS. That and POP3/ssl for email are on my wish list. Looks like tkMail will work fine

One question: Why are you going to use CF instead of SD for /home ? Is there some benefit the CF provides?

I just got a 256M SD card and will format it ext2 shortly, then I\'ll cp -a /home /mnt/card

I\'d like to keep the CF vfat for MP3\'s and such. I doubt I\'ll ever remove the SD once I get /home mounted on it. Anyhow the rightful owner of that flash is my poor digital camera :?

-T

[Tyris]

I had to tar /home to maintain the symlinks, but its now all copied to /mnt/card.

Im a little hesitant to rename /home and ln -s /mnt/card/home /home.

Will the Z be able to boot with the above arrangement?

-T