?PocketWorkstation1 runs in a chroot environment on a storage card, using the vendor's preinstalled native Linux system for most hardware access. GUI is based on Xf4vnc and the fbvnc framebuffer viewer.
See also DebianOnHandhelds for other related projects.
Runs on Sharp Zaurus handhelds: SL-5x00, SL-6000, and the clamshell models SL-C7x0, SL-C8x0.
http://pocketworkstation.org/ http://pocketworkstation.org/fbvnc.html
For discussions, please use the (low volume) http://lists.debian.org/debian-handheld/ mailing list.
This page is intended to be a community-editable forum to collect documentation, install instructions, tips and tricks.
Installation
... please copy from http://pocketworkstation.org/ There is also a good guide on http://zaurusfun.4t.com/index.html
Tips and Tricks
- The installation is configured with a default time zone. Run 'tzconfig' to choose the correct time zone for your location.
- If you only have 32 MB RAM or less available, be careful not to run out of memory. You can put swap space on a microdrive, but swapping to flash devices is so slow that you might as well let the system crash instead.
Platform specific notes and gotchas
Sharp SL-5000D, SL-5500
These should work without special tweaking.
Sharp SL-5600, SL-6000
see SL-C7x0 section, most of that applies for these as well ?
Sharp SL-C7x0, SL-C8x0
The SL-C7x0/8x0 support is still somewhat rough, and needs some manual tweaking:
- edit /etc/sdcontrol, uncomment and set FSTYPE="-t ext2"
The ["Action"] button is mapped to the <Fn> key. The Kana/Hira key (to the right of the <Fn> key) acts as <Control>, and the Kanji key to the right of that one is <Alt>.
- If you're running the original Sharp ROM with no Qtopia shutdown function or console command line mode, you can't run the Debian GUI directly. However, you can reconfigure it to show a prompt at boot, so that you can choose between Qtopia and a text console. Run the following from a terminal window:
echo a > /home/sharp/etc/launch.default killall qpe
- Run 'killall Xvnc' to kill all X11 applications and get back to the prompt, from where you can restart qpe.
- The clock keeps losing the current time and switching back to 1970 if you're not running the Qtopia GUI. Use date to set the software clock, then run sethwclock to copy the current time to the hardware clock.
Known Bugs
Current OZ versions mount the SD/MMC and CF cards in a secure mode with device files disabled, which unfortunately completely breaks the chroot environment. A symptom is that you get weird messages about devices such as /dev/null not working, and you may just get a blank X11 screen without any user interface, or terminal windows which open and close again immediately.
As a workaround, run the following from the command line:
mount /mnt/card -o remount,dev,suid,exec
On some machines, Opie and/or Qtopia crash when you launch it after previously running the Debian environment. This appears to be a power management conflict - try running /etc/rc.d/init.d/zdebian stop on the text console before launching Opie/Qtopia, and let me know if that makes a difference. An alternative on newer ["ROMs"] seems to be using the standard apm tool and not using zapmd at all.
On my Zaurus SL-5000D, operations that write lots of data to the MMC card often crash the Zaurus - it's still pingable, but the filesystem is dead. A typical symptom is "apt-get install" getting stuck at the "Getting package information..." stage. I think this is bug in the MMC/SD driver, everything works fine on a microdrive.
Mounting the SD/MMC card in synchronous write mode makes things very slow, but helps prevent these crashes:
mount /dev/mmcda1 -o remount,sync,noatime
Don Leuenberger reported that running a background sync loop during the installation also helps prevent crashes:
while true; do sync; sleep 1; done &
Since writes to flash memory are very slow, you'll need to be patient for many operations that would finish quickly on regular disk drives. apt and dpkg should be fixed so that they don't constantly write multiple identical copies of the package information files in various locations.
?OpenZaurus has a fairly weird startup sequence - Opie starts in the foreground, and the other startup scripts don't run until after Opie is shut down.
On the Compaq ["iPAQ"], Power and light management don't work out of the box, I haven't had the time to make the installer handle it yet. Send me mail if you care about this, and I'll fix it.