Best ROM for a c860 newbler..?

[shinoSetsuna]

hi all... just got my c860 yesterday in the mail, beautiful device, booted it up and of course cant do much of anything w/ it yet due to the language constraint. i understand that i need to flash the ROM in the device w/ a different version to enable english operation, but as i hunt through the various forums for the myriad different ROMs that are available, i get more and more confused as to which i should even be looking at. so, i was hoping that some kind soul could browse through my short list of needs in regards to my c860, and recommend the most painless ROM for my initial flash... as i get more familiar w/ the device and its quirks i'm sure i will try out others, but a good starting point would be nice. heres what i need...

1. web browsing w/ java
2. media playback (mp3, avi, etc.)
3. terminal function/command line
4. email (that external email light working would be nice!)
5. SSH and FTP
6. game emulators of some sort would be nice, but not a prerequisite...
7. Socket wi-fi and Bluetooth card support

if anyone could make a suggestion as to what ROM would be a good starter for a true Zaurus newbler, i would greatly appreciate it... i have a long-time familiarity w/ *nix already though, for what its worth... thx in advance all..!

[uczmeg]

Well as a complete newbie who is maybe a couple of days ahead of you (although I have less Unix/Linux experience) I would suggest you go with the Cacko ROM.

The Cacko ROM seems an ideal place to start as it bascailly keeps the Zaurus as a PDA but bundles a lot of interesting software with it too. You get a good choice of web browsers and media players included and there is a console for command line stuff.

The other ROM I have looked at is the pdaXrom. This basically turns your Zaurus into a mini linux laptop running X11. Very impressive and seems to have more software options available for it, but also quite daunting for the newcomer!

The good thing is once you've worked out how to flash a ROM it is pretty easy to flash a different one, so it's not hard to look at the options available to you. A nice read me file in the Cacko download (that you can find on this site) explains the process in simple steps.

I believe you'll be able to play emulators on either once you know what you are doing.

Good luck!

Cheers
Marc

[Chaos]

As far as I know, no browser on any Zaurus supports Java applets... MAYBE pdaXrom, with Firefox might be able to handle some, but that would be slow as cold molasses...

[ev1l]

Cacko is pretty nice. You can flash the device pretty easily provided you have any kind of memory card, and update it with a standard ipk package.
It's pretty similar to the Sharp ROM it's based on, but it takes away a lot of its quirks, and adds quite a few useful things.

[kic]

Here's my $.03 (inflation, you know) as I've tried several since getting mine.

I dumped the Sharp rom right away and went for pdaxrom. Nice, but the screen flicker was annoying, and well, it felt kind of slow. It also seemed like battery drain was a little higher than it ought to be, and that combined with it not liking my wifi card (Ambicom) and other little things, I dumped it and went to...

OpenZaurus 3.5.1. I think I liked this a little more, even though I really wanted to like pdaxrom because the idea of having a full little X system really appealed to me. I ended up wiping and reinstalling OZ after having some problems with various packages (user error). I was able to get most everything I wanted installed on it, but when I tried to load weather.com and it took30 seconds with Opera, and my ipaq can do it faster, I got a little miffed. And then I couldn't get TextMaker or some emulators to work, so I wiped that in favor of...

Cacko rom. I have the hotfix installed now, so version 1.21b, I believe. This is based on the Sharp rom, and of all that I've used now (I did briefly use the Sharp rom before dumping it, I have to admit), I like this best. It just looks professional and very polished. It also seems faster than the other roms I've used. Netfront is pretty fast, as is Opera. It could be that I was using Opera 6 before and that Opera 7 (7.3?) is better optimized, but there's a noticeable difference. I've also managed to get everything to work on the first try, but I haven't installed kismet or Wellenreiter yet. They'll be the real test for me.

Right now, I'm really enjoying cacko, and I'm looking forward to the next version. I've had no stability issues with it, whereas I managed to completely freeze pdaxrom and OZ more than once (again, probably more user than system fault). This isn't to say that pdaxrom or OZ aren't good, not at all, just that my current preference is cacko. I still intend to try pdaxrom when the next version comes out (preferably not an RC).

I think any rom will be able to do the core of what you've asked (aside from java, as Chaos noted), so it almost comes down to style and whether you want X or QT, or both, I suppose.