So I’ve been studying up on it and I’m going to flash my ROM to OpenZaurus. I’m a little trepidatious about the whole thing, but I will be doing it. While it is usable as it came out of the box from Sharp, I think this will make it closer to what I want. I believe that I’ll be able to finally sync something with my Mac OS X box if I do. Overall, I’m sure it will be a good maneuver, I’m just nervous in that “breaking the seal on the box” sort of way.
I’m not 100% sure if I can flash the ROM from the SD card. I’ve seen references that imply that ROM flashing can only happen from the CF, but then others that imply either. I’ll be finding out the hard way, I suppose. Looking around, I’ve seen a number of people who seem to flash from ROM to ROM at will so it can’t be that terrible of an operation to do. I have a 256M SD card and could fit a number of ROMs on there. If I can flash from it, I’m in business. All I need is to keep the OpieReader, the Pocketop driver, and Kismet installed and I’m in hog heaven. If I can sync then I can actually get some use out of the PIM stuff that PDAs are supposed to be for. Right now, losing the QTopia Address Book and Calendar isn’t much of a hit when there is nothing in either. I’ll report back here after I work up the courage to take the big step.
Here is one guys blow by blow account of installing OZ, in excruciating detail. I’m definitely keeping this to hand for a few gotchas when I do it. If worse comes to worse, I belive I can restore to these version of the Sharp ROMs.
Firstly, on the flashing from SD thing, I’m pretty sure that you can’t do that on the SL5* series (you definitely can’t on my SL5000). I think that the C* series added the capability (but don’t quote me).
Secondly, if you do get OZ, don’t forget that OZ fixes a bug in the standard Sharp ROM for which OpieReader has a work around. You should get http://www.timwentford.uklinux.net/opie-reader-opie_0.7e_arm.ipk or http://www.timwentford.uklinux.net/opie-reader-gcc3_0.7e_arm.ipk depending on which version of gcc was used for your ROM.
Tim, I haven’t found anything that says definitively one way or the other. I’m kind of interpolating from <a href=”http://play.datalude.com/blog/blogs/zaurus.php?p=62&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1″>this post</a> from a guy who seems to have a 5600. It would be nice if there were more definitive answers available more easily, but then I knew I was moving into the frontier when I got on the wagon train.
Thanks for the Opie Reader advice. I’m currently using it to read the iSilo formatted version of <a href=”http://www.craphound.com/est/”>Eastern Standard Tribe</a>.
I read it in the Plucker version 8^). Not quite as good as “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” (IMHO) but still very, very good.
BTW, it takes a long time for me to get to see these posts. It’s 1700 GMT and both of the above comments have only just appeared for me. If you need any “instant” help on anything which I may be able to help with, feel free to e-mail me direct.
There’s a certain irony there, isn’t there? I just finished it this morning myself on a break. I’ll agree on not being as good as DOWN AND OUT. It has a certain manic energy but never gels for me. The issues he raises are real and you and I are going through them right now. (BTW, howcome Central Time is never mentioned? I find it much more civilized than EST or PST because David Letterman starts at 10:35 instead of 11:35) But the characters never really engaged me, the startups didn’t seem so wonderful (it read like a watered-down CRYPTONOMICON in that regard) and so on. You know, old habits die hard. I don’t know why I automatically went for iSilo instead of Plucker.
I’ll email this as well so you see it, but getting to the very end of the iSilo version of the book causes the Opie Reader to crash quite repeatably. You might want to download that and check it out.
It turns out to be quite difficult working out exactly where iSilo texts end. I’ve improved things in my current development version but even that doesn’t work for EST. I’ll dig out kdbg tonight and take a closer look.
BTW, I didn’t get an e-mail but I do tend to aggressively filter that account (what do you expect on hotmail 8^) ). Putting the word (fragment) “reader” in the subject should help get you pass the spam traps.
Oh, and I actually used the mobipocket version of EST because I was testing out my latest tweaks to that and I wanted to avoid the segmentation of the text that the old version of Plucker used to cause. There is a “depluck” option in opiereader to get around this but you can’t page up past such a break (paging down is okay, though). The latest version of Plucker fixes this but documents with this fix in aren’t very common, yet.
Being in Europe/London I couldn’t possibly comment on Central Time but I get Letterman at 10.00pm 8^) (only its several days later than you get it).
I pretty much agree with all your comments about EST (the book) but the “Smart or happy” crisis appealed to me so I found at least some sympathy with Art – though the appeal of Linda definitely escaped me, too.
Actually I never sent the mail. The day was too busy and when I got home the power was out for almost the whole evening (and what little time I had with power before I went to bed was spent fsck-ing the errors the outage wrought on my Linux box).
The smart or happy didn’t grab me that much. It seems like kind of a false dichotomy – I like to feel that I am both. I didn’t buy that because if Art had just been able to suppress his smartass tendencies and keep his mouth shut, the whole mental ward thing would have evaporated. I found his character too grating that way. I’m enough of a geek that it takes little to set me off talking about optimization algorithms and the like but I actually can turn that off when I sense that it is getting me incarcerated.
I got an email from Guyhelm asking about formats I use that are currently unsupported in OpieReader. This is one responsive project! Wowza! PalmReader is the only one I have used seriously that isn’t yet represented in OR but I only used that on encrypted books when I had no other options. If y’all had some way of ripping the text out of PDF and displaying it, that would make this a Killer App. That’s a tough job, though, and it often screws up pretty badly.
Thanks for all your hard work and for keeping up with this blog so thoroughly. Your app rocks!