But with gcc 3. After that i cannot believe that i only get 6fps on pacman with mame To examine Zaurus development in an emulator, I ran nbench in qemu-arm-softmmu 0. Maybe Qemu can also run qtopia since a x 15 bits framebuffer is emulated? With this small shell script , I've tried to find some real battery life numbers for the Zaurus.
You use the Zaurus as an MP3 player for 24 hours! Recently, I've bought a new battery for my Zaurus. Very disappointing! It's roughtly equivalent to a mAH battery Hope I'll have more luck next time on Ebay Sharp battery mAH Graph Run time. Ebay battery mAH Mhz 1. Here's a small Perl script which converts.
The current release converts AddressDB. How to use:. One of the best features of the Zaurus,is that you can connect anything on the USB port.
You can use desktop Linux device drivers to make any usb device work scanner, dvd burner, wifi, joysticks I have a nice 54mbits wifi dongle with a Ralink chipset, but the driver is not included in the stock Cacko rom.
Here is my latest rt You may think: Great! I can use Wifi and plug a CF memory card! Last but not least: The convenience for the user is not only supported by the "big" paradigms, but also by small, almost trivial, considerations: So, for example, I have put the "X menu", the start menu for the applications, on the right side of the screen, so that it is easily available for right-handed people using a stylus.
A lot of PDA systems have that menu on the left side I always wonder why? And the clock always also shows the day of the week and day of the month in weeXpc: How often did you see the clock on the screen of your PC or PDA and asked yourself "And what date do we have today? These are only a few obvious examples of the many small optimizations we have put into weeXpc. I don't want to conceal the fact that, being a Linux and open source software based PC system on PDA hardware, weeXpc is not capable to perform some state-of-the-art tasks which many PDAs nowadays do: weeXpc is not suitable for GPS navigation, for doing phone calls, for Outlook synchronizing and it is not optimized for watching video or playing games but it is possible to do so.
I am a long-time power user of the HP LX palmtop. The list below gives a comparison between some HP palmtop programs and their weeXpc equivalents, as well as some of the hardware features of the HP palmtops compared to the weeXpc's:.
Due to data type differences an automated solution is not very probable. Bidirectional synchronization between weeXpc and Outlook is not possible, though. An outline makes much more efficient use of the small screen size as opposed to mindmapping. Usage is similarly convenient. Spreadsheet : There is no adequate replacement for Lotus for mobile computers. However, I have found a spreadsheet program for the weeXpc which has a lot of capabilities and can directly import Lotus files.
So data migration will usually be no problem. One caveat: The weeXpc spreadsheet application does not support macros or menus inside the worksheet. However, this is not very convenient due to the relatively slow speed of the emulation and due to some keyboard mapping issues. Text processing : Dependent on what you used on the LX, it will be more or less simple to migrate your text files. WordPerfect files are not directly importable. However, WordPerfect is able to save files in formats the weeXpc is able to use, e.
The weeXpc has several text editors, some of them with a GUI, some on the console. Depending on the used set of characters, the files may have to be converted to another encoding. Battery life Sharp Zaurus hardware : The excellent value of several weeks on a set of AA batteries, as we know it from the HP Palmtops, cannot be achieved with the weeXpc, since it has a much more powerful processor, a hard drive and a backlit color TFT screen.
Depending on the usage pattern, the weeXpc gives you 4 to 7 hours of constant usage. The battery is replaceable so carrying a spare battery is possible. Although the weeXpc has instant-on, a battery change requires a reboot, unless it can be powered by an AC adapter during battery exchange.
Depending on how many programs are open, instant on may take between 5 and 20 seconds. Due to the high stability of the system, rebooting is almost never required. This is comparable with the HP LX. 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.
Here is a quick summary of hardware and their level of support:. The main keys on the keyboard is mapped correctly on both distros, but is not very well documented on how to customise the keymaps. Some special keys are missing on both distros. Sticky keys can be enabled on pdaXrom which does not seem to be the case in OZ. Multi-key does not seem to work on OZ. OZ uses the matchbox window manager which looks quite ugly.
Fluxbox is also available. It looks very nice. There are also a host of alternate window managers available for pdaXrom such as icewm, xfce, fluxbox and kde. All those window managers can automatically resize the application window on load to fit the screen except for openbox which is the pdaXrom default window manager. The pdaXrom taskbar looks exceptionally pretty while OZ taskbar is rather dull. None of them have a docking view for minimised applications. However, OZ does not have a working applet for ejecting removable cards.
None of them have a swap management applet. The default theme on pdaXrom is quite pretty and can be customised through the theme config applet, but switching themes requires manual editing of the config file. The OZ theme, on the other hand can easily be switched and customised through its config applet, however, switching the theme on OZ results in some applications, namely abiword, to crash.
The config tools in both pdaXrom and OZ are a bit flakey and don't always work properly. You cannot use it to change the date or time. There is no applet in OZ to configure sound. The pdaXrom sound applet has no effect while applications that use sound are active. Suspend and resume is a bit flakey on pdaXrom. When it works, it works fine, but at times, it does not work reliably.
Suspend works fine in OZ, however, resume sometimes behaves flakey. Screen capturing is an easy task in OZ, however, this feature is missing in the default pdaXrom install. It can be added with contributed packages, although it is not as integrated as in OZ.
There are more useful applications in pdaXrom. There may be more packages in OZ, but the number of truely useful applications is greater on pdaXrom although some are oversized and don't fit on the Z's screen. A lot of the dialog boxes in both OZ and pdaXrom are also oversized. Some keys are incorrectly mapped in some of the applications.
Most applications depending on SDL libraries, for example, have wrongly mapped keys. Firefox also has many missing keys on OZ. Not only can it support many games through emulators, but there are also a lot of user contributed games of all sorts. Even a playstation emulator has been ported and optimised for pdaXrom. The default language of both pdaXrom and OZ is English. Support for other languages is provided via way of unicode fonts and input method support for entering extended characters using a virtual keyboard.
Now this is the biggest difference between pdaXrom and OZ. OE only runs on Linux and can target various platforms of which the Zaurus is one, but you will need a PC to build OZ packages and compile code. The native compiler which can compile code directly on the Zaurus itself is not very well supported on OZ.
It has a pre-made and configured development image that can be placed onto the Zaurus which allows you to immediately begin building and compiling. OZ developers are also concentrating more on developing PDA specific applications that works on other devices besides the Zaurus, ie they target devices with smaller screens and less storage.
In essence, pdaXrom is about turning the Zaurus into a mini linux PC, whereas OZ is more about providing a bleeding edge and alternate open source operating system, as well as lightweight applications for PDAs. The OZ community is divided into two distinct groups, the developers and the end users. OZ developer prefer to communicate through their mailing list which is very development centric and offer support on IRC for users.
They also announce things through their website and through posts on OESF. Documentation was almost non existant or scattered until recently. The new OZ wiki is a start for documenting a few things, but bug reporting is still quite confusing and tedious since there are several bug reporting systems and repositories.
Support for pdaXrom is pretty much community driven. The pdaXrom users help each other and collect workarounds for common problems until they are fixed. Bug reporting is much easier and simpler in pdaXrom, but the versioning scheme of pdaXrom is quite confusing since it does not adhere to a standard.
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