SearchSo I started investigating alternatives. I'm flashing a Xfce image on my Zaurus right now. Let's see how this turns out. Hopefully it's blazing fast of course. First impression is that it still looks great (I'm using the Xubuntu theme). In Qemu the performance is... okay I guess. I hope the Zaurus beats Qemu this time.
There are lots of other choices regarding WM's, and the suggestions some of you made tell me that it may also be a great matter of taste.
That's why I will upload two different images. One being a minimal image, on which people can install whatever they like and the other being a complete desktop image, with a standard set of packages pre-installed, like Firefox, Gnumeric, Abiword, Sylpheed, gqview etc
I'm very content with the Qemu solution by the way, were I pre-configure the complete image before I try it on the Zaurus. It saves me lots and lots of time. I can't imagine doing all the fiddling, configuration and installation directly on the Zaurus in the way I do it now.
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( 3 / 1780 )Just to show how Ubuntu looks on a Zaurus. This is the fullblown Ubuntu, with nautilus, gnome, metacity, firefox etc. Although it looks great, it's terribly slow. This is just a proof of concept I guess.
I'm currently experimenting with other window managers. First one I'm trying is Xfce. If this one's too heavy too, I'll try Fluxbox, Openbox and finally IceWM.
In the meantime, the ubuntu-minimal root filesystem is in it's third version here. Most errors are gone luckily.
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There seems to be a lot of interest in my Ubuntu project, according to the number of visitors on my blog in the last couple of days. This all thanks to this article on LinuxDevices.com and this one on engadget.I would like to add that although the goal for me is to get this working on my Zaurus, there's not much Zaurus-specific in the distro at the moment. I guess it should perfectly work on other devices, like the Nokia N810 for instance.
In the meantime I'm heading towards version 1.0 faster than expected. I have a full Ubuntu desktop installed now, including Gnome, gdm, Firefox, the whole lot. Most of the errors in the 0.1 release are solved already.
This distro is currently 215Mb in size (stripped and compressed). I don't know if it's worth uploading, because it's so darn slow. Maybe I just try the much lighter enlightenment as the default WM, I haven't decided yet, as I'm still experimenting.
I'm planning to upload two different flavors, one being the ubuntu-minimal and the other being the ubuntu-desktop.
Last but not least, any help on this would be much appreciated. This won't work if I have to do this all on my own. So, drop me a line using the Contact Me option from the menu on the left, or email me (omegamoon at gmail.com)
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( 3 / 1767 )I think it's time to let you all in on this. Detailed instructions on how to setup Frisky Firedrake can be found here, or from the menu on the left.
Have fun, and don't forget to let me know what you think about it ;-) If you have any questions or suggestions drop me a line.
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( 3 / 1678 )I have been away for most of last week, so there's not really much progress made.
The Fedora 8 (Werewolf) and Ubuntu (Frisky Firedrake) images are created using the Qemu ARM emulator.
I started by installing Debian using a kernel and a Debian (ARM) Installer. Having Debian working in Qemu I started to create the Fedora and Ubuntu images. Using Qemu instead of the Zaurus makes it much easier to configure the OS.
I use the xserver-kdrive from Poky, which can be used for the Debian image as wel as for the Ubuntu and Fedora images. I just had to convert the .deb packages into .rpm's for the Fedora image.
I'm currently having really annoying problems getting a working network connection for the Fedora and Ubuntu images, which makes downloading and installation of packages a real pain. I hope this won't take too much time.
I want to thank all of you offering me webspace to host the images. I guess I just have to pick the most easiest, and hopefully most stable, option, and upload the images as soon as possible.
And now back to Qemu and networking. Why isn't this working...
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Yeah, it really works. I have a minimal but functional command-line Ubuntu system running on my Zaurus SL-C3100.Not much more to say really, it's much like the Fedora 8 system. One big difference maybe is that Firedrake spits much more errors during first boot, compared to the Werewolf.
There's a lot left to tweak of course, but a full-blown Ubuntu is on it's way. This is really cool, having the same OS running on my desktop and on the much smaller Zaurus. This proofs that the Zaurus is the ultimate mini-laptop.
Anyway, the root filesystem is currently 88Mb, and as I said, it's just a minimal system. I don't have much hosting space left, so I guess you just have to believe me that it's working.
I won't be able to upload the image, unless someone has some hosting space left to donate of course, then I could upload the image. No problem. Use the "Contact Me" from the menu to drop me a line.
And now it's time to install some more packages :-)
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( 3 / 1760 )Wow, just read this presentation about the successful build of a full Ubuntu distribution for ARM architectures. The Mojo project did a marvelous job by building a lot of packages, really impressive.Now lets see how difficult it is to get this up and running. How cool would it be to have a full-blown Ubuntu on my Zaurus. Talking about a challenge!!
So, let the party begin, and start building!
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( 3 / 1730 )
I already promised a few of you a while back to upload the patches used in the Android image. For those of you using the OpenEmbedded build system I made it extra easy. Just download and extract the archive with patches into the OpenEmbedded directory structure, setup your system to use the linux-rp-2.6.23-r32 kernel and (re)build the kernel by issuing the bitbake -c rebuild linux-rp command.
If you haven't setup your OpenEmbedded build system yet, but would like to, you can checkout the Poky development system by running svn co http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/poky/trunk poky. Setup the system by following the README file. After that, extract the archive with patches into the OpenEmbedded directory structure, and build the kernel.
I included the kernel configurations I used for both the Zaurus Spitz and Akita devices.
For those of you adventurers using a different build system (why would you) or for those of you who just need the code for the panning support in the pxa2xx framebuffer code, replace the pxafb.c file from the vanilla kernel with the file here and build your kernel.
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Browsing the Net I recently came across the fedora arm wiki. Googling a bit further, I couldn't find anyone running fedora on the Zaurus. So I investigated the project a bit, and started some experiments in qemu. This was a few days ago, and now I have fedora 8 (Werewolf) running on my Zaurus SL-C3100 natively. Quite nice actually. I'm using my Poky 2.6.23 kernel and the base root file system with some extras from the huge repository.
So with fedora 8 another choice can be added to the long list of possible Operating Systems that can be used by the Zaurus community.
Not bad at all!
UPDATE: Some of you asked me if I would be willing to share the image so it can be downloaded here. Since I'm running out of hosting space, that's currently not possible. I'm trying to find someone who's willing to donate some space
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( 3 / 2100 )
I finally uploaded the Akita image for the latest version of Android. For installation instructions see the link in the menu on the left. Unfortunately I had to replace the previous M3-RC37 release because of lack of disk space.Please report any problems, and of course any reports on successful installation are welcome as well ;-)
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