Flashing Zaurus

Background: I've had this Zaurus SL-C3200 for a few years but made the mistake of using it for something useful! This prevented me from wanting to experiment with it as I relied on it for some very important real world applications such as password manager. Slowly, I've migrated all of my essential apps away which now leaves the device for playing with. My first plan was to try several of the alternative ROMs for the device. Until now, I've stuck with the Sharp ROM that's supplied with the unit.

Android:

I flashed this onto the Zaurus, but the experience was very disappointing. Firstly I could only get the interface to display in portrait. The clam shell device works best in landscape (i.e like a little laptop). Secondly, the stylus touch screen wasn't working. The only way I could control the UI was to use the joy pad. Overall not impressed.


Cacko:

This was a much more satisfying experience. This is similar to the Sharp ROM in that it has the same QT/Opie interface, but more reliable. Although this is no longer actively developed, it's one I probably will be keeping on the zaurus as it's solid. However I really would like to try out one of the X11 based ROMs.

Anstrom:

Very light distribution. Will have to install some packages to get a better idea. Need to get wifi up and running first.


05/10/2011

Getting tooled up: I've downloaded Gzip and 7-Zip for windows so I can unpack / pack linux standard archives. This should help me install useful tools onto the Zaurus.

Here are the distros that I'm aware of:
Cacko - solid conversion of the Sharp QTopia based ROM. This is stable but old and no longer developed.
Angstrom (formerly OpenZaurus) - This looks like it is still under development on several platforms. It comes with serveral UIs including X11 based ones.
pdaXng (next generation) - looks very cool, will try this as an SD rootfs. http://www.users.on.net/~hluc/myZaurus/pdaxiing.html
debian -

Excellent page on getting Cacko and Angstrom working: http://www.linuxtogo.org/gowiki/AngstromAndCacko It links to the following resources:

boot from Angstrom to cacko: /usr/sbin/kexec -f /home/root/zImage.bin

09/10/2011

Had a crack at getting the Buffalo wifi card updated with the latest firmware so I can use my WPA encrypted wireless network.
Following these blogs:
http://www.omegamoon.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry090823-223248
http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/

Downloaded the fireware from: http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/firmware/

Installed hostap-utils from angstrom feed and ran :
/usr/sbin/prism2_srec -v -f wlan0 pk010101.hex sf010802.hex

Ran into a problem whereby I couldn't flash the firmware because the kernel on Angstrom was blocking it. Apparently the solution is to rebuild the kernel. Scary!