[tlug] Thoughts on pdaXrom on the Zaurus 760

[Alain Hoang <hoanga@example.com>]

Edward Wrote:
> Alain Hoang wrote:
>   
>> > I decided to pick up a 2G SD Card to try out in my Zaurus 760 after dumping pdaXrom
>> > on it (That's another post).
>>     
> How well did the pdaXrom work on your 760.
>
>   
I've not spent a lot of time tweaking or researching on how to
get the Zaurus operate optimally for my personal use but here are
some impressions and thoughts (mainly confused ones) I have of
using pdaXrom. If any of the conclusions I've come to are wrong
feel free to throw error correcting tomatoes my way. :-)

Installation
-----------
Flashing my Zaurus to get pdaXrom up and running on the Zaurus was
pretty straightforward following the docs on the website.
However, I am unclear why the docs tell you to create a 50MB root
partition if you're a SL-C760/860/etc user then mention at the bottom of
the docs about something about wanting to use a root partition more
than 57MB to do some extra tweaking. Which is it?
I understand the 760 has 128MB of flash memory available but
why only create a 50MB partition on the flash? Since I'm rather new to
using the pdaXrom, I'm just trying to follow their directions.
Either way, right now I have stuck with the 50MB root partition
for now until I really understand my way around things.

qpkg impressions
------------------
Using ipkg wasn't a big deal for installing packages but 50M
is really much to write home about for space so I started trying
to install things onto the SD card. It might have been my own
dumbness but I was pretty sure I selected install into SD card
then selected 7 or 8 applications to install but somehow they
ended up on the root partition which ran out of space and made
a little bit of a mess. I'll need to double check again if that was
my own error or the qpkg GUI being dumb. (Most likely
me)

Moving more apps to the sd card
----------------------------------
It'd be a bit nicer to use the sd card as root or move
more apps over to the sd card however pdaXrom installs
a bunch of apps onto root but which ones can I safely
move around without breaking things? Are there any
apps that MUST reside on the root dir because of some
weirdness? For now, I've left it alone but I'd like to
keep the root dir a little bit cleaner and move things
to the sd card. The main reason I've held off is
after reading on the X/Qt Server Project page [1]
that glibc-locale-ja should not be moved to the
sd card.

Quake
-------
After seeing the Quake demo on your Zaurus I had
to install it on mine. Unfortunately, after finally
getting it installed successfully onto the sd card
partition (not enough space on root) Quake ends up
seg faulting on me at just about the time it should
show the main game menu. D'oh.
Also the runquake.sh script needs tweaking
to point to the right places on the sd card to
run properly but it still crashes so that's moot.

Fonts
------
The default feed of the pdaXrom site didn't seem to have
any packages for installing Japanese fonts or maybe I'm
missing something. I'm pretty sure I tried installing
all of them but Firefox definitely didn't show any Japanese.
I ended up getting around this by downloading the
kochi fonts linked from the PC Taijutsu page [2] and
dumping them in the appropriate directory. Firefox
then started showing Japanese pages appropriately.
Although one font is 9M so I'm thinking I'll install the
font files somewhere on the sd card and symlink it to
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/<mumble>
and see if that works since CJK fonts are not
lightweight in size and they'll easily blow out the
root partition in no time flat.
On an unrelated note, Arabic showed up
just fine in FireFox without having to install much :-)

Trying to disable suspend and failing
------------------------------------
I used to use my Zaurus as a portable mp3 player
quite a bit however I've noticed that the Disable Suspend
feature in Matchbox doesn't seem to work. This
is a major pain since I've noticed problems with
suspending when playing a mp3 in xmms (and probably
any type of audio for that matter). What happens is that
on resume, the audio device becomes unavailable to
xmms or pretty much any application. Killing the
xmms process doesn't do much at all. I've tried
unloading kernel modules to see if that helps but
the kernel won't let the audio module go so the
only way to get back audio (that I know of) is to
reboot the Zaurus. I never had issues like this with
the Sharp ROM since the default mp3 player
worked as I expected it to.
The only way I got around this is to set the
suspend timer to 0 and also set Disable Suspend
for good measure. This allows me to use the
Zaurus as a mp3 player but then I have to set
the suspend timer to something non-zero if I
stop using it as a mp3 player. So far I've
found this the most annoying un-feature
so far.

Connectivity
-------------
I don't have a WiFi or Ethernet adapter for the Zaurus yet so
have to rely on the USB connector for connectivity. My version
of Gentoo required a kernel recompile to add the correct
USB module for communicating with the Zaurus (thanks Sharp
for proprietary protocols). After that, I needed to spend time
configuring my Gentoo box as a NAT box for the Zaurus however
I haven't gotten to that yet...

Other
------
I really need to pick up the book [3] you mentioned in an earlier thread
since I'm really keen to read on tweaking techniques for getting the
Japanese environment running. However, I keep forgetting to write
down the name of the book so never have the title handy on me when
I'm at a bookstore.
I also have not installed a dev environment just yet.
I have been rather disappointed at the seeming lack of decent
documentation on the website of pdaXrom. While it is just
enough to get rolling, it could still use some more work for explaining
some of the 'what now' or 'where do I find this'? bits. Also the
package docs are sometimes too terse to make heads or tails if
certain packages are important or not which makes it hard to
judge whether I can uninstall it or not. Or maybe I'm just not
working hard enough to understand things :-)

Alain

[1] http://xqt.sourceforge.jp/download.html
[2] http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/jpninpt.html
[3] Title: 極めるLinuxザウルス pdaXromで作る最強環境
    ISBN：4-7741-2485-0