Didier, Here are a few things that may interest you...
Java support is pretty problematical.. the desktop benchmark of success and compatibility for a lot of java sites would be to have J2SE in a fairly current version running. Unfortunately to build this from source you need an earlier version of J2SE and a number of other tools - also current J2SE sources carry a lot of assembler, there is no ARM variant in the routines thus implemented and no standard C implementations for them either. The closest to having J2SE running would be the ARM Blackdown Java 1.3.1 but that only runs on ARM Linux - I have never seen the source to this and believe that it is closed source. I can also state from experience of experimenting with Swing on the Blackdown versions with ARM Linux that it is extremely slow and memory hungry. Mostly compilation of ports works well if the software that you are compiling from the ports is of good quality... not all software that is in the ports is of highest quality with regards to portability across architectures. Interested people may correct some of these ports and make them more portable, however, there are some elements in certain ports that can cause real problems on some architectures. - Typical issues tend to be byte ordering (not very common these days), assembler routines with no C implementation for unimplemented architectures and more obscure things such as value types (like char) which are used in signed/unsigned manner but without being explicitly declared as such (GCC behaves differently between various architectures for types like char where unsigned/signed isn't specified). Of particular note, you mentioned Firefox.. Firefox runs at around 46Mb of RAM and isn't the greatest thing to consider running on a Zaurus. Nevertheless I wanted to try it.. there are some issues with the portability of the Netscape Portable Runtime libraries present in Firefox that cause the build process to fail during the library signing stage. (actually you need to implement some conditional stuff to identify alignment, word sizes etc before you get to this stage). We may understand this issue better at some stage but I don't know of anyone that considers it to be the highest priority to implement Firefox or Mozilla for the Zaurus. This is simply because of the runtime demands of them as Theo mentioned. -Andy -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Theo de Raadt Sent: 12 March 2006 12:38 To: Didier Wiroth Cc: misc@openbsd.org Subject: *** SPAM *** Re: using openbsd on zaurus > I'm planning to buy a zaurus sl-c3200 (the latest zaurus 3xxx model). Please note that you would be the first person. None of us have the C3200 yet. > I had a look at the latest zaurus snapshot directories (on > ftp.openbsd.org) and saw that the choice of available pre-build > packages is highly reduced compared to i386. Most stuff compiles. Much has not been tested, though > Is it possible to compile and install any applications of the ports > tree on a zaurus (for example firefox, thunderbird ...)? Those two are pretty unreasonable on the Zaurus. It isn't that fast, and it is somewhat lacking in memory. There is some work on minimo, but it isn't completely reliable yet. > Does the ports tree system work as well on a zaurus as on the i386 > platforms or may I encounter severe build problems? As I said above, it is pretty good. But you have to be reasonable about how fast and capable a Zaurus is.
