(Well, this is rather about running Linux on a piece of hardware than the other way round.)
This page provides a few tips on Sharp Zaurus C1000 usage which I couldn't find in available documents on net easily. Everything concerns Sharp ROM, English version, bought from www.pulster.de. I'd have much harder times with the Zaurus if people didn't provide a lot of useful information and software on the net. Many thanks to them all!
Sharp Zaurus is a nice Linux PDA. With its keyboard and nice display it's a real general purpose minicomputer which makes it unique among similar devices AFAIK.
There are two things necessary to do:
# route add default gw
192.168.100.200. This has to be done after booting up and after
each resume from suspend.
qcop QPE/Network
'up()'.
All I had to do to get my bluetooth DeLOCK dongle connected through the miniUSB port run was to install the bluez-zaurus 2.12-2.4.20 package and reboot. Note the proper kernel version number, there are other versions of bluez Zaurus packages which don't run on Sharp ROM.
The Qtopia thing is not bad, but can run only Qt applications. If you want to run X applications, you have to install X on your Zaurus. One way to do this is to replace Sharp ROM by pdaXrom but then you give up on the less featureful but quite stable and PDA-specialized environment provided by Sharp ROM. The other way is to give up on performance instead and to install X/Qt, namely pdaXQtrom, that allows you to run X applications in the standard Zaurus operating system. I've chosen the second way.
pdaXQtrom is very nice as it comes in several compressed file system images (base, applications, games, gcc) that you can easily install on a card. Then you can run either standard X session or an embedded X. I recommend the second approach combined with the ratpoison window manager as it is less resource consuming and more comfortable.
Believe or not, Zaurus ships without Emacs! How to fix it? First install X/Qt, see above. Then you can install Emacs 21 or Emacs from available feeds. There is one problem with the current version of pdaXQtrom: It is necessary to remove the /opt/QtPalmtop/share/emacs link before installing the Emacs packages, otherwise their installation fails with somewhat weird error messages.
The preinstalled QPDF2 version works only in 320x200 mode and contains a lot of bugs. Upgrade QPDF2 to 2.3.0 and it will start working well except for non-English documents. Some Czech documents are displayed correctly, some not. In the latter case you can use Xpdf (less comfortable on the PDA than QPDF2, but more reliable) from pdaXQtrom.
There's a better alternative to the preinstalled video and music players (the most important complaint against them being inability to play Vorbis/OGG files): Kino2 + mplayer. Some documentation recommends using mplayer-bvdd-iwmmxt on similar versions of Zauri. However it doesn't run on the C1000 I use. I had to install bvdd and mplayer-bvdd to get video run in Kino2. Beware, after installing bvdd it is necessary to reboot the machine before mplayer gets usable.
This is the major problem of preinstalled applications on the Sharp ROM. In order to display Czech characters I had to install some unicode fonts and upgrade most of the standard applications. Some applications still don't work perfectly:
Czech character input is another problem. It's probably possible to remap the keyboard, I haven't tried to do it yet. Another option is to use Emacs to input anything supported by LEIM.
Milan Zamazal
<pdm@zamazal.org>
Last modified: 2006-11-10 13:45 UTC.