Re: using openbsd on zaurus
If all you are looking for is a small portable email client/web browser for the road, check ebay for a really small/cheap laptop.. aka: the thinkpad 240. It is fully supported by openbsd extremely easily. An out of the box install of openbsd easily runs on the 240 without much configuration needed. These little laptops are cheap and reliable. The only thing which kinda sucks... when playing music, if you use headphones, you can hear the hard drive access noises since the laptop is so small. That doesn't bother me much though as I whore the ipod everywhere I go anyway. I'm hoping to use a zaurus as a full featured browser, email client while on the road
Re: using openbsd on zaurus
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.
Re: using openbsd on zaurus
Oh and one other thing.. Apart from the changes to the flash ram size between the 3000 and the 3100 there were some changes to the CF handling. Be aware that Sharp may have decided a more cost effective production scheme for the 3200 (i.e. may have changed something unexpected) so I would err on the side of caution and wait until somebody announces that OpenBSD is up and running on that device before purchase. -Andy -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andrew Smith Sent: 15 March 2006 11:43 To: 'Miscellaneous OBSD' Subject: Re: using openbsd on zaurus 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.
Re: using openbsd on zaurus
On 12. mar. 2006, at 13.37, Theo de Raadt wrote: 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. Hi, dreaming For faster cpu, and many built-in goodies, I believe a similar cpu (intel pxa270) is also used in the Qtek 9000 PDA: http://www.qtekcorp.com/products.aspx? Level1=1Menu1=0Model=22Submenu=2 including: Intel XScale @ 520Mhz 640x480x65k touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard GSM/GPRS/UMTS radio; 802.11b radio; 64MB RAM (128MB ROM) + SDIO/MMC card for decent flash disk. mini-USB, IRDA, bluetooth. 2x loudspeakers/headphone, 1.3Mp camera. /dreaming obviously I'm aware cpu != machine etc etc. I guess it would just be a case of buy 3 ( one for me, and 2 for obsd devs) and hope that sufficient documentation would prevail... /Pete
using openbsd on zaurus
Hello, I'm planning to buy a zaurus sl-c3200 (the latest zaurus 3xxx model). I would like to install and run openbsd on it, but I have few concerns. I'm an openbsd amateur and don't have any cross compilation knowledge/experience. 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. Is it possible to compile and install any applications of the ports tree on a zaurus (for example firefox, thunderbird ...)? Does the ports tree system work as well on a zaurus as on the i386 platforms or may I encounter severe build problems? Many thx Didier
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.
Re: using openbsd on zaurus
On Sun, Mar 12, 2006 at 12:25:53PM +, Didier Wiroth wrote: Hello, I'm planning to buy a zaurus sl-c3200 (the latest zaurus 3xxx model). I would like to install and run openbsd on it, but I have few concerns. I'm an openbsd amateur and don't have any cross compilation knowledge/experience. 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. Is it possible to compile and install any applications of the ports tree on a zaurus (for example firefox, thunderbird ...)? Does the ports tree system work as well on a zaurus as on the i386 platforms or may I encounter severe build problems? Everything I've tried has worked. That includes Doom. However the zaurus only has 64M RAM and the CPU is wimpy enough (no FPU), so compilation of larger packages takes some time. And just because something compiles does not mean it will be really usable on the little screen and wimpy CPU. I don't think Firefox/Thunderbird is gonna be a happy thing on zaurus. Minimo is pretty bad already. Many thx Didier
Re: using openbsd on zaurus
Thanks for replying. Please note that you would be the first person. None of us have the C3200 yet. Yes, I know, I tried to find the c3000 or c3100 at a reasonable price here in europe but the c3000c3100 are not available anymore. They are sold out on kd85. What I found is that the c3200 has the exact same specifications as the c3100 (the one with a larger rom) and it also has a larger HD, 6gb. I was not able to find an article that mentionned any other differences. 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. Ah, ok I didn't know minimo. Will have a look at it. I actually would like to take it later with me on holiday to surf the web and read my email via gprs (with a siemens connect2air card). I've another question regarding compatbility with some websites using some annoying third-party technologies like flash and java. Unfortunately to get some info or make reservations online you can't avoid these flash and java websites. I read the FAQ (regarding opera and flash) and actually use them on the laptop. I was wondering if you are able to surf websites with a zaurus with a minimal set of software and correctly display sites using flash and/or java? If you are able to do it, what software are you using? Thank you very much Didier
Re: using openbsd on zaurus
On 12/03/06, Didier Wiroth [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've another question regarding compatbility with some websites using some annoying third-party technologies like flash and java. Unfortunately to get some info or make reservations online you can't avoid these flash and java websites. I read the FAQ (regarding opera and flash) and actually use them on the laptop. I was wondering if you are able to surf websites with a zaurus with a minimal set of software and correctly display sites using flash and/or java? If you are able to do it, what software are you using? Java for making reservations? Where did you find such a web-site? The most these web-sites use is document.all incompatible IE4 DOM model, instead of getElementById. No Java -- only some JavaScript. Flash is also rarely used on most reservation web-sites. Cheers, Constantine.
Re: using openbsd on zaurus
Java for making reservations? Where did you find such a web-site? Well ... it was a sample ;-) but there are sites that use java menu buttons etc ... The most these web-sites use is document.all incompatible IE4 DOM model, instead of getElementById. Yes, I certainly wish it would not be the case, but as mentionned previously most use some special features and I was simply wondering or curious how the openbsd community deal with the problem on a zaurus. No Java -- only some JavaScript. Flash is also rarely used on most reservation web-sites. Here are some samples for Luxembourg: http://www.zebra.lu or here http://www.editus.lu/ This is extremly annoying as you can't use those sites without flash installed. (I do agree that it is the companies problem but they don't bother about 1 user complaining) I'm hoping to use a zaurus as a full featured browser, email client while on the road
Re: using openbsd on zaurus
On 2006/03/12 14:01, Didier Wiroth wrote: Thanks for replying. Please note that you would be the first person. None of us have the C3200 yet. Yes, I know, I tried to find the c3000 or c3100 at a reasonable price here in europe but the c3000c3100 are not available anymore. They are sold out on kd85. Also out at figlabs and trisoft. pricejapan still list all the models. Intriguingly they also say 'Europe Model Name : release-3/17/2006' for the 3200 - could this be official European availability? What I found is that the c3200 has the exact same specifications as the c3100 (the one with a larger rom) and it also has a larger HD, 6gb. I was not able to find an article that mentionned any other differences. The keys are different colour (seems insignificant but as an SL-C3100 owner I wish I'd got the 3000 instead as the keys would be easier to read when it's dark). More RAM would have been nice... maybe they're holding that back for a SL-C3500 or something. 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. Ah, ok I didn't know minimo. Will have a look at it. konq-e is lighter than minimo. dillo is lighter still. elinks is useful for a surprising amount of websites though, and despite being a console app it does support the mouse so there's an alternative to pressing down- down-down-down-down through a long list of links. And very fast of course. For websites with heavier requirements I'd usually prefer to run Firefox or Opera (ssh x-forwarding from a remote machine) but I rarely need this. I find even konq-e a bit heavy for my liking (Dillo's pretty acceptable but is less tolerant of broken websites). I'd feel a bit differently if I only had GPRS though - I can often find 802.11 without too much trouble. I find my CF wifi card indispeensable (and zhost USB cable gets a lot of use).
