my Zaurus SL-C3000 and SL-C3100
http://www.users.on.net/~hluc/myzaurus/
158 of 212
16/09/2007 12:23
The above is a screenshot of Cacko after heavy customisation. It looks just like my customised
Sharp distro. I also symlinked an Australian locale/inputmethod and also added an Australian icon
for the keyboard applet.
pdaXrom
pdaXrom is another alternate distro for the Zaurus. It is essentially a complete X windows
environment. Thus pdaXrom would make your Zaurus into a mini laptop with an X server and a lot
of the X applications available on your desktop/laptop Linux distro ported to the Zaurus. There is
also a pdaXrom X86 version that is for your desktop/laptop so you can run the same applications on
your Zaurus and your PC.
The latest pdaXrom release is currently 1.1.0 r121 and the SL-C3100 is supported, however, it is
not stable and full of bugs. There is also a beta version for the SL-C3000 based on the 1.1.0beta1
release (pdaXrom 1.1.0 beta1 for C3000 beta2) which is much more stable. There are still a few
issues with the betas and hopefully, once they are all resolved, pdaXrom release version should be
great. The most stable versions are still beta1 and beta3. Anything after that, ie beta4 or r121 are
stil in the early stages of development and testing.
I decided to test pdaXrom on my SL-C3000 because the C3000 beta2 release of pdaXrom 1.1.0
beta1 features a pivot boot feature that uses /home on the MicroDrive instead of the tiny 4MB
/home on the flash. This neatly fixes the problem of the tiny /home running out of space since the
flash on the C3000 is only 16MB and only 4MB of it is allocated to /home. However, this also
prevents the MicroDrive to spin down for power saving and thus battery time is reduced, but it also
responds faster due to no repeated spin up times (just replace the MicroDrive with a Flash Card and
it will be perfect).
Installation went flawlessly following the instructions on the OESF forum. The C3000 installer
repartitions and reformats the entire MicroDrive into a single 4GB partition during install. Once
installation is finished and you reboot, you will end up at the command line login prompt. Login as
root without password and then use
startx
to get into the X GUI (well, it should boot right into the
GUI since it is runlevel5).
pdaXrom is a X windows environment that is by default pre-configured to use openbox as its
window manager and uses matchbox applets for its panels and taskbar features. There is also a
host of default applications pre-installed with the base pdaXrom install, most of which are quite
useful.
However, there are many more applications available for pdaXrom from its feeds. The X86 version