Author Topic: C860 Questions (Read 7198 times)

Guinnessmonster · « **on:** May 07, 2004, 08:05:21 pm »

Hey, just wanted to post and introduce myself, and ask a couple of questions of you highly trained Zaurus Ninjas.

I\'m still waiting for my shiny new C860 to arrive from Japan, should be here on monday, cant wait It seems my frist mistake however has been in not ordering a UK AC adaptor with the unit. I only ordered a USB sync cable with a mains adaptor thinking this would be fine for charging, but as far as i\'ve read you need to connect the AC adaptor to flash the unit to other ROMS. If this is the case and i cant just use the sync cable, what voltage/amperage adaptor do i need to buy to safely plug into the thing without nuking it? I\'m assuming i can just buy a generic AC adaptor from an electrical shop rather than having to order a special one, right? Also is there any real difference between charging with the sync cable and the AC adaptor, is one better for the battery than the other or anything weird like that?

Second question is that i saw in some other posts that the older zaurus models at least were not able to take advantage of the extra read/write speed of the Ultra SD storage cards. My question is, does anyone know if this is also true of the C860 series, or will it be pointless me spending the extra on an Ultra card? Just wanna know before i go and waste money on one :wink:

Final question, does anyone have any experience with the Socket CF ethernet cards? I\'ve ordered one of the socket low power CF\'s but i\'d quite like to get a 10/100 card. Just wondering if anyone can tell me what the battery life is like when using the 10/100 cards compared to the low power one, it seems the difference between 19mA for the low power and something like 140mA for the 10/100 is quite a big difference, just cant decide if its worth the tradeoff in speed.

Cheers,
GM

lawnjam · « **Reply #1 on:** May 10, 2004, 07:15:45 pm »

Hope your Zaurus arrived ok.
I\'ve not had mine long, so I can\'t answer all your questions! I\'ll do my best though.

The AC adapter is 5v - I\'m using a cheapo multi-voltage thing and it works fine...
The USB sync cable has a connector you can plug your ac adapter in to (instead of connecting it at the back) - there doesn\'t seem to be any difference.
I saw a japanese website about making a cable which draws power from usb to charge the zaurus with - this might be a good alternative to an ac adaptor - I\'ll try to find the link

I\'ve got a 10MB CF ethernet card. I think throughput is limited by the CF interface so there\'s no point getting a 10/100MB one. 10MB is faster than my broadband anyway, so it\'s not a bottleneck!

Matti · « **Reply #2 on:** May 10, 2004, 08:32:20 pm »

Welcome to our world!

AC adapter - I use the adapter that came with a creative labs nomad3 (total turkey don\'t buy one) which is also identical to the unit that came with a canopus advc-100 external DV and video capture interface (pretty neat but not for the Z!) 5V at 1A or therabouts and have had no issues.
USB adapter - I have a retractable one that looks like this : unit from shirtpocket.co.uk. (Highly recommended)
This cable *doesn\'t* have an external ac input, it draws power from the USB port and I\'ve just checked - you /can/ flash with it. I think if the amber light is on - you are in business.
I wouldn\'t have thought that a 10Mb NIC is going to be a bottleneck to the Z. I have a trendnet 10/100 unit (and a C760)- if you want to define some tests I\'ll run them and we can see if we can find someone with a 10Mb interface to compare against.

raybert · « **Reply #3 on:** May 11, 2004, 11:58:05 am »

I haven\'t plugged my C860 into an AC adapter in months!

I bought a couple retractable USB sync cables from <http://shop.brando.com.hk/zaurus.php>.

My C860 is plugged in all day at work and whenever I\'m working on my home PC. It\'s always fully charged.

~ray

SharpEnd · « **Reply #4 on:** May 14, 2004, 03:03:02 pm »

Quote

Welcome to our world!

DHL just delivered my c860! Just opened the box...

back later....

waalkman · « **Reply #5 on:** May 15, 2004, 01:24:11 am »

Just got mine today as well

As for using an \"off-brand\" adapter (be it AC or be it DC), be sure that the \"tip\" (the inner part) is the + and the \"ring\" (the outer part) is the -

(I just checked mine using my Fluke).

Failing to do this could damage your unit. Otherwise, any decent, regulated, 5 volt supply should do the trick.

And as for a USB charger, keep in mind that it can only draw 500ma (500 milliamps).

And oh, nice site you\'ve got here guys

John

Teletubbie · « **Reply #6 on:** May 15, 2004, 06:18:08 am »

Hi,
all of you should be very aware using external power. I dont have a c860 but have read lot about distroyed Chargingunits in the Zauri, by using cheap 5v adaptors. Please search in the forum, so you may find which adaptor is sure to be used or just ry to buy an adaptor from the Z Models that are provided in your country by sharp. The Adaptor from the 5500 Series for example should work with the c Series too.
Cheers,
Sam

Guinnessmonster · « **Reply #7 on:** May 15, 2004, 09:49:43 am »

Hey, thanks alot for the replies.

I ended up just getting a 240v to 100v converter and am using the japanese adaptor that came with it, seems to be working fine Thanks for checking that you can in fact flash with just the USB cable Matti, just wish i\'d known it was possible to do that before i went and spent Â£15 on that converter I\'m not sure how to go about it but it might be worth adding this little nugget of wisdom to the FAQ section, as this was the sole reason i went out and bought a converter when it seems i didnt really need to, but oh well, i\'m sure it\'ll come in handy at some point.

As for the CF ethernet card i\'ve actually been quite happy with it so far, seems to last qute a long time on the battery and performance is fine (tho i\'ll probably take that back when i turn up at a client site with a 100MB only network). Matti, how long on average does your 10/100 card last on the battery, just under normal use? Be interesting just to get an idea of the battery drain compared to the 10MB card.

I\'m still learning how to use the Z (and its amazing so far) but the only other major problem i\'ve been having is with installing packages. I\'m running Cacko 1.20 (cant upgrade to 1.21 as my little 32MB CF card is just a tiny bit too small to hold the ROM, at least until my microdrive arrives in the post) Anyways i\'m having real trouble getting ipkg to recognise or install packages. The one single package it did recognise was qpdf2, but aside from that it wont see anything else. Every time i try to install from a feed i just get a message saying \"ipkg says something went wrong, Sorry.\"

When running ipkg install from the console it seems to run off and get the package but always throws up an error \"zcat <packagename.ipk>: not in gzip format\" Can anyone tell me what i\'m doing wrong?

I\'ve read some other posts relating to this problem and see that it seems to be something to do with two different IPK formats but i still cant figure out how to fix the problem. I\'m going to cry if dont get wellenreiter installed soon, and you dont want to see a grown man cry now do you? lol

Cheers,
GM

ThC · « **Reply #8 on:** May 15, 2004, 09:55:05 am »

you should try installing your package with the konsole ... open the konsole, type su to get root priviledge then cd /wherever/your/ipks/are and ipkg install xxx.ipk ... you\'ll have a more verbose description of what went wrong

Guinnessmonster · « **Reply #9 on:** May 15, 2004, 10:01:49 am »

Same error, \"not in gzip format\"...

I just saw another post where someone was having a similar problem and upgraded to the 1.21 Cacko rom and everything worked fine. Maybe i\'m just gonna have to wait for my microdrive :?

ThC · « **Reply #10 on:** May 15, 2004, 10:09:03 am »

so it\'s not the good format ... maybe a package for a familiar distribution or so ? try downloading it from a different source

piotr · « **Reply #11 on:** May 15, 2004, 01:19:01 pm »

Hi,
Ive had similar problem. here I found solution - but first - install hotfix.
http://www.zaurususergroup.com/index.php?n...iewtopic&t=3447

piotr

Guinnessmonster · « **Reply #12 on:** May 15, 2004, 02:30:30 pm »

ok, this is starting to make a bit more sense now, i borrowed a friends CF card and flashed to the Cacko Qtopia 1.21 rom and applied the hotfix, only to have the same problem.

However i\'ve been looking at the IPK files in a text editor, all the files that wont install start with something like \"debian-binary\" while the ones that seem to work, dont start with this. So i\'m guessing that the version of ipkg that comes with Cacko doesnt recognise these file formats? If this is the case, where can i download a version of ipkg that will recognise them?

GM

ThC · « **Reply #13 on:** May 15, 2004, 02:34:30 pm »

I definitly think the problem come from the feed you\'re using ... where are you downloading your ipks ?

Guinnessmonster · « **Reply #14 on:** May 15, 2004, 02:48:28 pm »

Have tried installing from a couple of the different opie feeds and from the wellenreiter feed on www.vanille.de/feed/openzaurus/xscale-gcc3.32/

neither work, am i trying to download from the wrong thing here?

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Author Topic: C860 Questions (Read 7198 times)