Archive for July, 2006

Katastrophos.net Zaurus feed updated

Published at July 23, 2006 in Gadgets and Zaurus. 0 Comments

I’ve updated the Katastrophos.net feed with the newest versions of
lftp 3.5.1 website
pure-ftpd 1.0.21 website
autossh 1.4a website
rsync 2.6.8 website
screen 4.0.2 website
joe 3.5 website

All binaries are compiled from the current releases.

You can find the permanent feed here:
http://www.katastrophos.net/zaurus/packages/

Enjoy!

C3200 Tweak #3: 2 GB SD-Cards in Cacko

Published at July 23, 2006 in Gadgets and Zaurus. 0 Comments

The C3200 Cacko ROM doesn’t include the same SD driver as Sharp ROM. Download the new driver here:

http://zaurus.daemons.gr/menaie/feed/sdmmc-module_2.4.20_arm.ipk

This should solve the freeze when inserting large SD/MMC cards with capacity > 1 GB.

C3200 Tweak #2: Improving Samba performance

Published at July 23, 2006 in Gadgets and Zaurus. 0 Comments

The preinstalled Samba server on both Cacko and standard Sharp ROM proves to be notoriously slow. This is mostly due to the strict syncing that’s enforced in the smb.conf - probably to avoid data loss. IMHO, it’s rather safe to disable this behavior and in turn get a nice speed bump. Here is how to do that:
On Cacko first delete the default link to the ROM copy of smb.conf:

sudo rm /etc/samba/smb.conf

Now, copy over from ROM and modify the copy:

sudo cp /usr/lib.rom/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf
sudo mcedit /etc/samba/smb.conf

Comment out lines

strict sync = yes
sync always = yes

Change the socket options line to

socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=131072 SO_SNDBUF=131072

Please remember to reconnect the mounted samba share on your desktop system.
In my case the transfer rate on my Buffalo 10Base-T CF-Card jumped from 350 KB/s to over 820 KB/s.

C3200 Tweak #1: FAT32 to Ext3

Published at July 23, 2006 in Gadgets and Zaurus. 2 Comments

I don’t need the ZaurusDrive feature of the newer Zaurii for the internal harddrive. So, having ext3 on this drive instead of the regular FAT32 opens up some possibilities (read: Debian install :) ).
So, here is how to turn the biggest partition of the internal harddrive on a C3200 from vfat into ext3fs:

Edit /sbin/hddmount and /root/etc/rc.d/rc.rofilesys and change all occurences of

mount -t vfat -o noatime,quiet,umask=000,iocharset=utf8 /dev/${IDE1}3 /hdd3

into

mount -t $LINUXFMT -o noatime /dev/${IDE1}3 /hdd3

These instructions refer to Cacko ROM 1.23. They might be different for the original Sharp ROM.

Now, before reformatting /dev/hda3 with

mkext2fs -j -b 2048 /dev/hda3

Make sure to backup all content on this partition before doing so.

New Zaurus

Published at July 23, 2006 in Gadgets and Zaurus. 0 Comments

So, I finally made the jump to the new C3×00 series. Bought myself a SL-C3200 at Pulster. And now I’m sitting here setting up everything and enjoying the new freedom (6 + 2 GB, that is). What a mean little machine! :)
The additional storage capacity is excellent compared to my C750, where the limited support of SD-Cards up to 1 GB has become a big drawback for me.
In normal use the machine itself is not necessarily faster than the C750. However, at everything multimedia it flies. DivX movies at 640×300 were slideshows previously, now they play back in smooth realtime - thanks to mplayer/bvdd/iwmmx. Also, battery-time is very much improved. I’ve actually tested MP3 playback the other day with the display turnt off and only XMMS and my Buffalo Ethernet card (very low-power) running. After round about 10 hours it was me that had to go to sleep. ;) So, no idea how long it would have had lasted, probably 3 hours (battery was at 30 % when I turnt the device off.).
Anyway, I’ll be posting some Zaurus-related stuff later. So keep an eye on that. :)