About Roms

[shodanjr_gr]

Got my Z about a week ago. I didnt really like the way the Sharp rom looked (didnt do the screen much good) so i flashed the tKc Rom and felt good with it. But i couldnt get the sys info app to work on it, so i am now downloading the Zynergy rom to try out.

In general, what rom have u guys flashed ur Z 5600 with? How do you think it rates as far as appearance/functionality/speed goes?

Give me ur opinions

[waterzap]

Zynergy seems good, visually, but some things on it like the installer don't seem to work. And could not get Mp3's or movies to play after I installed the Sharp player again.

Sharp ROM's seem pretty stable and everything seems to work. In the end that is more important for me than what it looks like.

[Chaos]

Personally, I use my own ROM I've created. It's pretty nice and once I'm finished should be better than the Sharp ROM it's based off.

Currently have it booting, and it works well, just some minor issues that I have to figure out where to correct.

The colours work correctly, (using ZCrystalBlue as theme), but the wallpaper that I set as the default does not show up on first boot. It's set as the default wallpaper (wallpaper/default) for the ZCrystalBlue theme, but only appears once you go into the appearance and then exit back out. Anyone know how to actually make it appear by default?

Also I cannot find where Qtopia keeps the "Shade Text" option set. Does anyone know this?

Once these issues are fixed, and I have time to finish repakcing all the IPKs I need, I'll post it up on the internet for everyone's use.

[cycojesus]

Personally, I use my own ROM I've created. It's pretty nice and once I'm finished should be better than the Sharp ROM it's based off.

Currently have it booting, and it works well, just some minor issues that I have to figure out where to correct.

The colours work correctly, (using ZCrystalBlue as theme), but the wallpaper that I set as the default does not show up on first boot. It's set as the default wallpaper (wallpaper/default) for the ZCrystalBlue theme, but only appears once you go into the appearance and then exit back out. Anyone know how to actually make it appear by default?

Also I cannot find where Qtopia keeps the "Shade Text" option set. Does anyone know this?

Once these issues are fixed, and I have time to finish repakcing all the IPKs I need, I'll post it up on the internet for everyone's use.

wallpaper by default : copy it to /usr/QtPalmtop.rom/pics/wallpaper/default.png

shaded text, I've found it !! : in /home/zaurus/Settings/Launcher.conf set
    [WallPaper]
    label = 5
 to 5 instead of 3 (or it's the other way around, 3 instead of 5 I don't remember  )

I've made my own ROM too but I've been too ambitious with embedded softwares so it got too big and my Z is bricked for the moment as I don't have a card reader to put an old ROM on my SD to flash it back to a workable one ... I'll have to wait 'til 17th september... Sad cause my ROM was getting just fine
It's based on latest TKC with openssh upgraded to 3.7, subapplet to 1.0.8, opera to 7.30 ; I stripped all themes and installed by default zflat from www.zaurusthemes.com and finally took bootscreen and wallpaper from www.zaurusthemes.com too.

EDIT : by the way, does anyone know the maximum size of the initrd.bin file so I don't brick my Z again ?

[mike151]

I am not sure about the max size for initrd.bin, but I can report these two sizes from two CF I used to flash my 5600:

23032668 is from Zynergy Rom
21512206 is from Sharp Rom

Mike

[cycojesus]

I am not sure about the max size for initrd.bin, but I can report these two sizes from two CF I used to flash my 5600:

23032668 is from Zynergy Rom
21512206 is from Sharp Rom

Mike

How I didn't thought about looking at that ?!

Lets add original TKC : 21985432

[mike151]

cycojesus, could you please also report how big was the initrd.bin that bricked your zaurus? That will be a known theorical upper limit we should avoid.

Mike

[cycojesus]

cycojesus, could you please also report how big was the initrd.bin that bricked your zaurus? That will be a known theorical upper limit we should avoid.

Mike

Sure, I should have thought about this myself :

Code: [Select]

~/zaurus/Dev/Custom_ROM/$ ls -l initrd.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 cycojesus users 25204436 2004-09-04 18:21 initrd.bin
Since the Z bricked I removed zknights which is 1.7 MB fat. The restulting initrd.bin is 24277444 bytes fat... but obviously I can't try it because of the brick...

[cycojesus]

I was just looking at what apps I've added :

Code: [Select]

3,1M    apps/qpdf2_render-freetype-2.2.1-20040217_arm.ipk/
76K     apps/qclockchange_0.1a_arm.ipk/
1,7M    apps/zknights-cyco_0.6.0a_arm.ipk/
Damn it !! I didn't thought qpdf was that big !!

[Chaos]

Interesting. So to be on the safe side when creating 5600 ROMs, keep it at about 23000000 bytes for the initrd.bin at most... I'll keep that in mind.

[dougeeebear]

I have an SL-5500 with standard Sharp rom 3.13. I have tried other roms, but I came back to the Sharp rom. Everything works perfect with it, many programs will load on SD card and work fine, no crashes, no problems.
A couple things to keep in mind..
Don't hurry the zaurus. Give it a couple seconds to settle down after running applications such as Opera browser, and secondly, NEVER reboot twice without shutting down, then restarting.
My rule of thumb is to shut down/restart every time I want to reboot.

Just my opinions... Doug

[cycojesus]

Interesting. So to be on the safe side when creating 5600 ROMs, keep it at about 23000000 bytes for the initrd.bin at most... I'll keep that in mind.

23068672 bytes to be precise apparently. That's exactly 22MB.

Right now I'm playing with OZ 3.5.1, liking it a lot

[Chaos]

Personally I'm still gonna stick away from OZ. My Watapon's being very kind to me.

Although some of the packages in the feed are broken and non-functional... Mostly the ones not used by me personally (so no testing on them done ).

[loji]

How are you liking 3.5.1 on a 5600     I always heard it was *really* unstable.

any problems?   Do you overclock?


I use a zyngery ROM overclocked to 471 turbo freq... and I never have ANY problems!   but there are alot of great opie only apps.

[cycojesus]

How are you liking 3.5.1 on a 5600      I always heard it was *really* unstable.

any problems?   Do you overclock?


I use a zyngery ROM overclocked to 471 turbo freq... and I never have ANY problems!   but there are alot of great opie only apps.

what's unstable ? There's little things to do to make it really usable as replacing the package manager with opie-aqpkg which works, and be careful to not enterly fill up the / partition... But aside from that I find it much more "to my tastes" than Sharp based roms, in terms of available packages (see OE to build your own), configurability and usability. In fact with OZ 3.5.1 I find my 5600 much more useful, it was a kind of "useless" geek-toy and now it's more a tool that I can use to work (and play ).

As of overclocking : yes I do, qclockchange is compilable throught OE and it works. My 5600 is running at 471 too, with default OZ 3.5.1 kernel, I used tetsu v15 when using Sharp based roms.

My words is : backup your current Zinergy and give OZ 3.5.1 a try.

if you want here's the lists of packages I add and remove to the standard OZ 3.5.2 installation :
REMOVE :

ntpdate opie-aboutapplet opie-button-settings-pics opie-deco-liquid opie-deco-polished opie-doctab opie-multikey opie-multikeyapplet opie-networksettings opie-packagemanager opie-style-fresh opie-style-liquid opie-style-metal opie-style-phase opie-style-web

ADD :

aliens-qt atomic froot hexatrolic icebloxx inkwp knights mahjongg opie-aqpkg opie-backup opie-bounce opie-calculator opie-confeditor opie-formatter opie-i18n-fr opie-kbill opie-kcheckers opie-kpacman opie-memoryapplet opie-minesweep opie-reader opie-recorder opie-restartapplet opie-sfcave opie-solitaire opie-tabmanager opie-tetrix opie-tictac opie-ubrowser phalanx portabase puzz-le shisensho sokoban subapplet tickypip tron win4 zmerlin zrev7 zsubhunt

What I miss now is wordgame (opie/qtopia scrabble wannabe) and a little C compiler like tcc.