Month: July 2006

C3200 Tweak #2: Improving Samba performance

Posted on by Andre Beckedorf

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

Posted on by Andre Beckedorf

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

Posted on by Andre Beckedorf

So, I finally made the jump to the new C3x00 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. :)