Zaurus SL-C860 and OpenZaurus/OPIE 3.5.3

Actually I was about to write good documentation for the Zaurus but this prooved to hard to begin with, so I'm starting with what everyone does: These are my experiences. Unskilled as I am they are not of much help. "Your Mileage May Vary".

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.