• Did quite some backups of my OPIE data
  • Multisync 0.82-5 (debian sarge) to Evolution via sftp
  • tar/bzip2 of /home
  • opie-backup to file on CF.
• Installation procedure worked like charm.
• Asks for a (root) password then user details with password. Big plus for GPE
• Now it comes to syncing the data back:
  • I couldn't find a (binary) gpe plugin for multisync 0.82-5.
  • Got and compiled opensync/multisync0.90 from subversion source. Had to get the following debian sarge packages: libxml2-dev, libsqlite3-dev, libglib2.0-dev. (You need opensync before you can make multisync.)
  • Appearently I got only the CLI version of msynctool, no GUI. (Well, actually I prefer this.)
  • Got and compiled the evolution2 plugin. Had to get the following debian sarge packages: evolution-data-server
  • GPE plugin was missing, too. Got and compiled it.
  • Hint: The OpenSync Wiki provides Debian packages and tarballs (including GPE module) if you don't want to deal with svn.
  • Followed the instructions to do the sync:

    Synchronizing group "gpe-evo" 
    The previous synchronization was unclean. Slow-syncing
    Member 1 of type gpe-sync just connected
    Member 2 of type evo2-sync just connected
    All clients connected or error
    Member 2 of type evo2-sync just sent all changes
    No contacts tables found. Creating... done.
    No calendar tables found. Creating... done.
    Member 1 of type gpe-sync just sent all changes
    All clients sent changes or error
    Member 1 of type gpe-sync committed all changes.
    Member 2 of type evo2-sync committed all changes.
    All clients have written
    Member 1 of type gpe-sync just disconnected
    Member 2 of type evo2-sync just disconnected
    All clients have disconnected
    The sync was successful

  • But it wasn't successful. Nothing there, neither in Evo, nor in GPE. (Evolution's data must have been deleted while playing with multisync before.)
  • Syncing between OPIE and GPE (both on Z) didn't work with GPE image.
  • Last resort. Copy kdepim directory to $HOME on desktop. The kdepim pluggin seemed to require multisync/GUI. So, I had to get lots of UI libraries, almost all of KDE and all of GNOME.
  • Execute the GUI at /usr/local/bin/multisync0.90. Many errors. Looks like the multisync from debian sarge but says "experimental".
  • Says "Synced Successfully. Read 1 entries. Wrote 0 Entries."
  • Ok. I learned that neither on the Z nor on the desktop, the kde pim data is where it's supposed to be in ~/kdepim. I give up.

summary: Nice big (=readable) UI elements.

My initial plan, plan A, was:

• Full NAND Backup to CF
• Copy OZ installation files and Sharp ROM image from TRIsoft to CF using Zaurus as USB Mass storage.
• Full NAND Restore
• OZ installation

• pdaXrom install files on SD card.
• `halt`, remove battery and USB/AC, reinstall both, OK+Power
• Menu 4 / 3: Update from SD, Y
• resise root to 64M(i)B
• Reboot while holding OK
• Menu 4 / 2: Update from CF, Y (It's getting interesting)

  --- Zaurus CF updater ---
  MODEL:SL-C860
  kernel
  [progress bar]
  Success!
  RO file system
  Flash erasing..done
  [progress bar]
  Success!
  --- Finish ---
  Rebooting

  Looks great, I never got that far.
• "OpenZaurus w/ kernel 2.6" boot logo, cursor blinks, for ages nothing happens. The read-on-blue progress bar is on the very beginning. Nothing happens.
• Remove CF, battey, USB; replace battery, Power on, same problem

Back to plan A:

• Remove battery and USB/AC, press M and D while reinstalling battery, connect USB/AC
• Diagnotics Menu: NAND Restore to Sharp ROM from TRIsoft:

  NAND Restore from CF
  file:SYSTC860.DBK
  Execute Restore? OK
  
  Delete all flash data? OK
  Resotre...OK Cancel

  (Italics are keys pressed)
• Extra Menu / Reset = shutdown
• Remove CF card, Power On, Sharp boot screen, Japanese, cursor blinks. Zaraus boots into GUI. Doesn't look too bad at all.
• Insert CF card, execute md5sum and check with source, just to make sure I didn't make a stupid mistake again:

  298b4adb5851abda23eb68047163da4e  zImage.bin
  c1f5d9cd2e09cbaf662f1723a853b289  initrd.bin
  f5aa58e71c73f4b5151b8b33967bb27f  updater.sh

  I delete all the other files on CF. (Maybe OZ doesn't like them.)
• From df I learn /dev/root=/ is 54272KiB=53.0MiB, /dev/mtdblock3=/home is 69632KiB=68.0MiB
• Reboot from Qt menu, holding OK.
• Menu 4 / 2: Update from CF, Y
• same procedure as above. Remove CF when it says rebooting.
• OZ red-on-blue progress bar moves. Messages that are not errors! Wow! Welcome to OPIE!
• First step, first mistake: Clicked on terminal 1, got a text console, didn't know how to go back, but searching OESF Forum helped.
• Found opie-console (like xterm). Happy.

OK. No usbnet here. (No, I'm not even trying to setup IP MASQ or USB/Ethernet bridging on XP.) Thus, I need wireless. My cheap ADTEC card gets recognized as "D-Link DCF660". The network here doesn't do DHCP, but manual setup is simple (if you know gateway and DNS, of course). Now it's time to install additional software and give it a test...

problems: In OZ it's possible to turn the backlight completely off (0%), plus Fn + 4 doesn't work, so I had to plug USB power to change light settings, quite annoying. The package manager segfaults from time to time. GAIM works for me but not perfect (random segfaults). I think icons and some software was designed for screen resolutions less than 640x480: The launcher bar and fonts (default settings) are a bit too small for me. OM/PI (email) doesn't work for me, I couldn't find any documentation nor any help in forums; sad.

pros: OPIE PIM, that is Ko/PI and Ka/PI, are OK. Unless you are already in love with some other PIM suite, you get everything you'd have ever possibly asked for: Today applet tells you what's on now. With Todo and Calender you enter what's on for the future. Multisync works for OPIE and Evolution via sftp. (This requires openssh and friends on Z.)

Boots in landscape mode and displays text console login. Login works as root with blank password. startx works as expected. Asks for screen calibration. Try my best, however the result is terrible. Exit. rm /etc/pointercal (from FAQ and my Vr3 experience), startx. Better. Screen rotation works. I got X on Z. I'm as happy as a penguin can be.

The taskbar is not as nice as Cacko/qtopia. The applets are simpler. Everything seems desgined for landscape mode (or not desgined for a PDA at all). I bought a clamshell because that exactly what I wanted, a tiny laptop, but for showing off PDA style is better. The X server seems to take quite some to "decide" what orientation to display. That's a little bit annoying when powering on. The only input method is keyboard and virutal keyboard, from a PDA I'd expect some form of character recognition. Finally, I'd prefer a simpler window manager as default (one app at a time, fullscreen).

CF memory card ejected (clicking on the cards popup menu is unmount/eject) and WLAN CF inserted. Card blinks. GUI shows no reaction, but what a surprise, according to dmesg the hostap_cs driver got loaded. The cards menu calls my ADTEC card (vendor said equivilant to a SMC) "Zcomac XI-325H 200mW". (Oops 200mW, doesn't sound like a lot of mobility but I was aware of that when buying, was the cheapest.). Menu / System Tools / LAN&Wifi looks like it would be easy to setup if I had a AP nearby. iwconfig and so on are present.

Now it comes to heavy testing for stability, usability and additional software, of course. I chose 50MB for the root fs as recommended, this leaves 71MB for /dev/mtdblock/3 mounted as /home and /mnt/usr according to df and mount (both rw), but /mnt/user is mount --bind /home/user...

Anyway seventy megs to be used, I need usbnet/IPMASQ again. usbnet works out of the box. The Z thinks he's 192.168.129.201, I'll accept this for now (can be changed in Menu / System Tools / USB). Setup my desktop box (describe this later), set passwd for root on zaurus and ssh works. Tried dillo and liked it, but you can't do without horizontal scrolling in portrait mode. The default font is too small. (I can read it, I have good eyes, but I think they'll worsen if I continue with this setup.) BTW: pdaXrom.org is the only site I've checked which didn't look good. Dillo has the tendency to ruin table layouts.

Menu / System Tools / Package Manager. Configured the "official" feed. The list of availabe packages is impressive, the manager is intuitive. This time I'm not going to make the same mistake I made with Cacko (installed *everything* which looked interesting), I gotta to make some choice. Productivity is not on the aganda, I need something to play with: Firefox, gaim, gimp, gnumeric, gpe-calc, gtodo, kdepim, kopi, minimo, nmap, octave, yacas. (I hope this will all fit on my 69MB free space. BTW: I miss emacs, of course, and a SIP (VoIP) tool.) top tells my Z is heavily wgetting. There's no progress bar, but df -h is a good hint. Available space is 0 now, still nothing happens. Commands start failing (as displayed in tab Log), I want to stop it and retry with a smaller set of applications, unplug the cable, kill the package manager: Free Space 23MB now. Same apps as before. Restart X. Magic.

Firefox: OK. This was important to prove, but it's slow. GAIM: Maybe the most important toy for me ATM; works. Stylepheed: Well, it works (IMAP/SSL, SMTP/STARTTSL/AUTH), but its UI seems to big (for me), I'm a mutt fan.

summary: Ok, it works with X and firefox and everything, that's impressive for the linux enthusiast or the one who really wants to squeeze his desktop into his pocket. For everyday use the GUI needs work. You can argue about portrait or landscape, fullscreen versus windows, but in any case windows must fit on the screen! I hate to use stylus and keyboard at the same time, input should be improved. When playing around with the WLAN applet X sometimes crashes.

Before getting started with my Z I had already tried to compile a comparision of distributions. Going by this, pdaXrom looks very attractive, if you don't need PIM, but I chickend out and decided to go for OZ/OPIE first. (Remember, I need a system to work well out of the box to impress my friend.) And OpenZaurus seems kind of the default setup. Sadly I realized a painfull lack of documentation, plus broken links and expired domains where documentation was theoretically available. (What you need is in the left hand bar on openzaurus.sourceforge.net.) Before upgrade you need "standard flash partitioning (e.g. as it was originally)" and no one seems to know what this really means. Ouch.

Well, then, my attempt to install OZ/OPIE 3.5.3. People haven't reported serious trouble with OZ installation, so it I think I can do it, too:

• NAND Flash Backup from the secret Diagnostics Menu to CF
• Booted into Cacko's update.sh from Maintenance Menu and used his nice NAND Partioning Tool to create a 40MB root partition. The size was guess based on what I learned before.
• prepared CF with

  http://oz.hentges.net/mirror/oz3.5.3/c7x0,c8x0/opie/opie-image-c7x0-20050411221036.rootfs.img
  http://oz.hentges.net/mirror/oz3.5.3/c7x0,c8x0/updater.sh
  http://oz.hentges.net/mirror/oz3.5.3/c7x0,c8x0/opie/zImage-c7x0-20050411221036.bin

  renamed as

  -rwxr-xr-x 1 jk jk 19709968 2006-02-20 19:25 initrd.img
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 jk jk 5365 2006-02-20 19:22 updater.sh
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 jk jk 1313808 2006-02-20 19:22 zImage.bin

  (surprised that the image is called initrd and that it's only 19MB)
• Booted into OZ installer, flash seemed to work. Reboot. Nothing much. Oomph! That's where I'm now: INIT: No inittab file found (Now, it's official, I'm a newbie, a looser; me, who shows off by reading mail with mutt in a public place making people around me (using webmail) think I'm cracking into some big mainframe. That's tough.)
• To make things easier, I employ the 128MB SD from my digital camera and put Cacko's installer on it.
• Cacko "Format user partition", hoping the OZ installer would behave different then. Didn't.
• Try 50MB root partition, didn't make any difference
• Installed Cacko again, just to be sure this was still possible.
• Tried again to install OZ. Looks better:

  mount: Mounting /dev/ram1 on /dev failed: No
  such device tar: /dev/*: Cannot create symlink to '*': Read-only
  filesystem tar: /dev/*: Cannot mknod: Read-only filesystem tar:
  /dev/*: Cannot create directory '*': Read-only filesystem INIT: Id
  "1n" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

  (The * are wildcards for many similar lines) Not a lotter better, I admit. This is at least something I can google for.
• 5 min later:

  prctl:
  PR_SET_OOM_KILL_SURVIVAL_LEVEL is not supported ERROR:
  /usr/sharp/etc/launch.conf -- cannot open file ERROR: launch.conf --
  cannot open file /sbin/launch : launch.conf not found INIT: Id "1n"
  respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

• Got on the nerves of people at oesf.org and linuxontour.de. I'm sure that would have solved the problem, but not as quickly as I wanted to try out my Z. It's seems OZ's installer (update.sh) is very picky about partition sizes. Pgas told me the correct size is about 53MB and I'd need to do NAND Restore. I didn't try either resizing to 53MB nor the NAND Restore yet.

summary: Well, I think the installer script (Hint: steal from the other distors) and the documentation need work. When I have more time on my hands, I'll give OZ another chance. I appreciate the work on a distro optimized (not just crosscompiled) for PDAs. OPIE is nice. The same on X (such as GPE) probably even better.

I owned a VR3, the first linux PDA, before and loved it for its flexibility. Of course, I'd fancy a Zaurus, but it was low on my agenda. To be honest, I don't need a PDA and they are pretty expensive for a poor student. But then, things changed rapidly. My friend wanted a mobile Internet device and he was considering buying a Windoze Smartphone like those Taiwanese HTCs as known as "?da" in Europe. That's a challenge as that could have been the final battle in our personal holy war. (OK, I want to convince my dad, too, of the power of the penguin, but he's a lost soul. The only gadget he'd really accept was one either running Newton or VMS. Unless someone builds this he's stuck with M$ products, he hates and continues to use anyway.)

So I made some research and finally got a used SL-C860 via linuxontour.de and ebay. (My favourite dealer temporarily stop selling Zaurii because of legal trouble with his more expensive competitor.) It's in very good shape and came with 256MB CF, Z remote control headphones, two USB cables and leather bag for 350 EUR. I found this was cheap (and only changed my mind when I learned that new N770 sell at the same price). The only trouble was finding a suitable escrow service, in the end we used paypal. Quickly bought a cheap Prism2.5 Wifi CF card which is known to draw a lot of power from the Z but it doesn't bother me much as my university's stupid closed source clients only policy prevents me from really using it. (My friends uni allows vpnc; good for me, he'll think linux is great.) The two things left to buy is a power source – I'm thinking about a solar powered battery pack (that's cool and cheaper as Sharp's original European power supply) – and a headset for VoIP.

Got it with Cacko1.22 on it. First thing to do was upgrade to 1.23 full and play around with kismet and wellenreiter II. (All WLANs in my neighbourhood use WEP. Fuck, I thought all private wireless APs were open for the owners were either ignorant about security or would advocate open access for their own comfort when away from home.) Worked quite well, rokugo's translations helped with Japanese menus. Decided quickly I wouldn't like cacko full for all the software (mostly Sharp PIM) installed by default is worse than it's open source replacements such as OPIE. The 860 has sufficient flash to support both Sharp and OPIE at the same time but menus get really big. I hated that Xqt sometimes went Japanese and didn't work in PDA style (portrait) mode. Oh, and I almost screwed things up while trying to secure the installation by disabling sudo. OK, some digital photos are a must nowadays.

The next obstacle was internet access without the help of my ignorant neighbours with their WEP secured WLANs (I didn't want to try my luck with aircrack.), that is usbnet, kind of ethernet over USB. The WIKI documentation seemed outdated and I didn't understand Sharp's Settings/Network applet but standard linux ifconfig/route did the job and I could ssh from PC to the Z. Great. OK, IP masquerading then, shouldn't be to hard on linux 2.6.x but it took me a whole day to find iptables_nat. Some one has hidden it under Device Drivers (I was not going to add hardware to my box, was I?), Networking support (OK, this was an easy guess), Networking options (hmm), Network packet filtering (easy again, netfilter rang a bell), Netfilter Configuration (the only choice here, easy again), connection tracking (this was the hardest one to spot), IP tables support (yeah!), Full NAT (Do I need this? Hint: Yes), MASQUERADE target support (Finally, I'm there.) (JFTR, this is when I started liking the concept of kernel modules. It is my first modularized kernel ever.) The hardest part was finding out /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward was 0 on my debian box.

summary: Cacko is a good distro. I didn't use for more than a couple of days because I wanted more. But -- hey! -- it works out of the box. You get all the standards from Sharp including the popular Opera browser plus a great feed with the most important open source stuff. Yery good to start with, I should have kept it. Only thing, it messes with partitions, which may cause trouble with OZ installtions. (I don't think we can blame Cacko here, because Cacko has a working partitioning tool.) However, I'd recommend Cacko lite for flexibility.