Zaurus files

The beta4 and its successor r are really new versions because of their drastic change with the introduction of a new boot mechanism and replacement of the stable 2.

As a result of this, most configuration tools are broken and many of the applications need to be recompiled. If you want to put up with a buggy distro for testing, then you might as well move to OpenZaurus instead because it actually fully supports all C3x00 models. OpenZaurus comes in two main flavours which you can choose from.

There is also an experimental Enlightment version too which is another powerful X11 window manager. You can also install Opie and GPE on different virtual terminals and thus have both running at the same time and switch between the terminals.

This can be done with a bit of hacking but should ideally be the default for the clamshell models so you get the best mix of applications from both Qtopia and X11 environments since they have plenty of space for it. However, OZ appears to be very developer centric. It is coupled with a build system, OpenEmbedded, and very much focused on building, packaging and source control. It is a system build from the ground up and focuses a lot on the kernel and clean builds.

The OZ team appears to be very organised and have a very structural approach. Unfortunately, this sometimes comes across as being inflexible and stubborn by some end users. It also sometimes appear that usability is given less importance in favour of portability. The gap for this is filled with the Hentges distro, which is a more user-friendly distro based on OZ. Both are a more user-friendly repackaging of a more rudimentary distro.

Hentges is currently available for Akita C and Spitz C3x The latest version of OpenZaurus for the C3x00 is 3. This is something very hard to avoid for software projects unless you take Sharp's approach of not updating the environment and just patching it up when forced to.

OZ takes the opposite approach. It is constantly being build and it integrates a lot of features from other Linux distros such as altboot and kexec.

OZ also takes advantage of the MicroDrive available on the C3x00 and thus installs itself to the MicroDrive instead of the flash.

This of course has its advantages and disadvantages. On the C this would be a great advantage, however, the same is also done for the C and C which may or may not be as advantageous.

The C and C are more or less treated like a C on OZ since they are almost identical as opposed to what other distros do, which treat the C like a C with an extra harddisk. OpenZaurus also boasts to have around packages and that their package dependencies all work.

However, this is not entirely true. They naturally forgot to mention how many of those packages actually work. Unfortunately, a large percentage of those packages don't actually work or are just mostly useless cannon fodder. Their large number also is a result that they split up every component into a separate package. So while some distros convenniently have one single package for an application, OZ would split it up into several dozen packages.

Thus they need to heavily rely on their package dependency to pull all these packages together. Needless to say that not all their packages are up to date and not all dependencies resolve properly. Some packages have not been updated for quite some time. I believe that OZ has a lot of potential to be the best distro eventually. See my custom OZ page to see a list of customisations that I have applied.

However, in its current state, it can be summarised as fast but useless. GPE is quite ugly but pretty fast as well. However, it is buggy and unstable too. In theory, OZ can do everything perfectly, however, in practice, it is quite a long way from that goal. One thing the OZ team needs to do to woe more Zaurus users is to provide at least the same feature rich applications and functionality as the other distros already have.

They should expand their repository to include more useful applications and actually test their packages before they put them on their feeds. They also need to get off their high horse and not just say that OZ is the best and everything else is crap. There are a lot of great functionality the other distros have that the OZ people could learn from and adopt to make it better.

It is quite ironic that a distro that so heavily depends on package dependencies does not have a working GUI Package Manager. However, I like these hacks ie keyhelper because they are actually very useful and make the Zaurus a pleasure to use. Angstrom is the successor and replacement for OpenZaurus once it is stable and fully working. At the moment, it has the same problems plaguing OpenZaurus if not more.

The kernel has been updated to the latest 2. From a Zaurus point of view the main difference between OpenZaurus and Angstrom is that Angstrom is build around the arm EABI which means applications should run faster in general if they are able to run without crashing. The move to Angstrom also provides a newer GCC 4. From a developer point of view, this means they can work with the absolute latest libraries and frameworks such as QT4 and OpenMoko.

From a user point of view this means an unstable system which keeps changing and although there are many packages, hardly any testing has been done on them. Angstrom aims to be a generic platform for portable devices not necessarily Zaurus. This means, the priority of Angstrom is to be able to be installed on as many devices as possible. The consequence of that is that it needs to be generic and not too machine specific. However, to be really user friendly, a distro needs to be customised for the target platform and take advantage of any of its features whether they be generic or unique to a device.

Many performance optimizations as well as usability features are often very machine specific. Debian is another future possibility for the Zaurus once it has become stable. Hopefully and equally as stable kernel can be build for it as well. In the meantime, there has been quite a bit of work on enabling the arm based Debian to be installed on the Zaurus similar to PocketWorkstation but without reliance on an already existing distribution.

Titchy is such a distro based on Debian arm and a 2. It also has its own installer which installs an initial rootfs onto the MicroDrive before connecting to a Debian feed to install the rest of the system.

Not sure whether I am going to try it though. Learning Linux is already keeping me quite busy. There are basically several choices to be made. First one is to whether use the older but stable 2. I chose the 2. The 2. The next major choice is whether to run Qtopia or X For the 2.

When choosing between Qtopia and X11, the look and feel as well as what applications are available is of importance. For Qtopia applications, Cacko and Sharp ROM have more applications since they are backward compatible with older apps and they run commercial applications. On the X11 front, there appears to be more useful applications and games available for pdaXrom and it looks much prettier than GPE as well.

OPIE is not a real choice since it lacks essential applications even though it looks nicer. For the SL-C, the choice is a bit different since there aren't many distros that really support it. There are also alternate boot loaders for the Zaurus other than the default one provided by Sharp.

With the introduction of the 2. OZ has simplified the pivot boot process with altboot and once kexec is integrated, it could be used to boot other distros as well. Using one of these bootloaders might be a way to boot and pivot the rootfs on the C to overcome the tiny 16M flash problem. However, the SL-C is a bit different since it got a tiny flash. The choice for a distro for my SL-C is quite hard since none of the currently available distros are quite ready yet. However, neither of the two has gotten to a point yet where it is stable enough to use and includes sufficient useful applications and utilities.

Both still have a lot of shortcomings. Below is a discussion about why these two distros have potential and also where they fall short.

Firstly, the OS needs to be able to boot and mount the internal MicroDrive as rootfs. OZ does that very well, however, pdaXrom does not officially support the C so it needs to be hacked to do that.

Also, the perfect distro needs to fully support the SL-C hardware and its many powerful features. The SL-C has great hardware which more or less is supported by both distros. The steps you will have to carry out are: Copy an appropriate binary of the encryption program to Zaurus and, optionally, to the PC. Create "save" and "restore" bash scripts. Details Before you do any of the following, ensure you have an up-to-date conventional backup and know how to restore the Zaurus after performing a "hard reset".

Ensure that it is executable; if necessary consult Linux chmod command documentation for details. Read Burp documentation in burp. Using a text editor that writes clean ASCII text files, create two files, one called "bkopenv" and the other called "rstopenv". These names suggest "backup of operational environment" and "restoration of operational environment". You can change the names of these scripts, rename the encryptor program and use a different name for the directory where the archive will be stored, as long as you consistently change all references to such names in everything that follows.

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