Zecrazytux's diary - Free softwares && geeky stuffs

I’ve meet (not IRL yet :D) a French guy who is gonna join the same school as me (SUPINFO).

His nick is TKZ. Men, take care of him :) He’s a good geek (nerd ? :D) who can help us to get a great polished Debian running on our Z :)

He has updated zdevil’s rootfs, replacing icewm by fluxbox. He has fixed some problems concerning sound and logging on the Z as simple user.

(He’s a fuckin paranoiac :D, but I agree with him. Don’t use your Z as superuser ! This is a bad habit, and is it a good idea to crash your fully working Debian just before your conference or demo, just cuz you type a crap on your xterm ? :D)

His rootfs is available for testing here. The root password is toor. Please give your opinion, to make it more and more polished :)

This boy has time, so get advantage of it :)

A long time has passed since my last topic about zauriis. I was (well, i’m still, and still ‘ll be) busy enought to don’t find the time nor the motivation to write down my works and tips…

Now, I wanna tell you some things about it :)

I tried to get Enlightenment DR17 compiled for Debian armel (EABI).

To do this, I used apt-get source (from edevelop.org’s Debian repository) and dpkg-buildpackage, natively on my C1000.

I took quite a long time, but much less than I expected: about two days, with retries due to lack of dependencies.

Well, I got E17 base packages. Then I installed it and tried to launch it by replacing "openbox-session" by "enlightenment_start".

First, it seemed to start well. But it kept freezing on the splash screen. I got no errors but the ouput in the terminal was stopping too after "start fm2".

I was very surprised cause I could use it on qemu-arm with a kernel from poky, and E17 started fastly.

I talked to Rasterman, a night, on IRC. He said that it might works, as i got the sources and that there’s no differences in the code depending on the architecture.

Moreover, he and we all know that E17 runs great on zauriis as he already has builded packages for Angstrom. (There is E packages for pdaxrom, too). (And remember that it works on qemu :o, with the same rootfs).

It is very surprising, to me. The only difference between Debian armel on qemu-arm and on my Z is the kernel: poky’s one on qemu, and yonggun’s on my Z.

It is possible that E17 doesn’t launch correctly due to the kernel ?! I’m a n00b, you know, so i’m waiting for some great hackers to answer me :) But I would be very surprised if it was the key :D

For now, I’ve given up… I have too few time to spend on it. I mean, I must get involved in other sorts of projects (work, school, and personal interest for *BSD and openSolaris)…

But It would be great to get this awesome wm running on our Z ! So if someone gets it working, please tell me :)

Now, i’m using openbox and rox.

Just install openbox and rox-filler, and replace icewm-session by:

rox —pinboard=mypinboard —bottom=mypannel&
openbox-session

Some weeks ago, I said I was looking towards making a working rootfs of Debian sid for the Zaurus. The aim was to provide a debian installation wic can work out of the box. I suceeded to install it, to configure out many things. I got the sound working, the touchscreen too. The only thing I could’nt get working was the middle and right clicks. I’ve been busy for days, and finally zdevil has released his own rootfs. I installed it on my C1000 this afternoon. The middle and right clicks work great with younggun’s kernel, so i think the poky’s 2.6.22 kernel i used before wasn’t compatible with the way we got these clicks: with keybindings and xmodmap.

First, lots of thanks to Zdevil for his work ! This rootfs seems to be configured enough to be used by a common zaurus user, now O/

I’ve installed openbox and rox-filer wich has pinboard and panel fonctionalities. Epiphany works great and is quite fast ! That’s awesome to get a fully working Debian distro on the Z. Quite everything you want, is separated from you by an apt-get command :D (well, that’s not true compared to a X86 Debian repo, but it is compared to pdaxrom, poky…)

Here are some pics:

edit: Zdevil share his work on this OESF’s forum topic: Zdevil’s debian rootfs for zaurus

To start rox and openbox:

   .xinitrc:
#icewm-session 
rox --pinboard=mydesk --bottom=mydesk &
openbox-session

Great, don’t you think ?

I’ve been looking for installing Debian on my Z (zaurus) for some months.
Since 3 or 4 months, Debian is became the biggest hope of Z users who don’t use their machine only as a pda but as a mini laptop… (and btw, many of these guys like to hack and to test new things :D) thanks to its ARM port and especially armel thanks to the GNU EABI toolchain. EABI let us hope better performances and more packages (EABI would make portage and packaging easier).

I already tested that armel port of Debian on my C1000 through a boot from sd (containing a full debian base rootfs). I had some problemes with the touchscreen and the right click.

This night, i tried again and now i’m on a better way: Debian Sid isrunning a poky 2.6.21 kernel and E16, with touchscreen and right click support.
I only used packages from gnuab.org’s armel repository and poky’s release3 rootfs (whereas installing packages from angstrom or other files i could’nt know where they came from ! as the kernel was from poky, i though thhat was a better idea to take its tslib and other zaurus specific stuffs :p)

i’ll release an out of the box running rootfs as soon as possible :p

ps: for those who don’t know what this topic speak about or have miss pieces of informations about zaurus and available distros, take a look at oesf.org (there’s a link on the left)