Marcin Juszkiewicz June 27th, 2006
About one month ago one OpenZaurus user contacted me and Michael ‘mickeyl’ Lauer with info that he want to donate two Zaurus machines to project - SL-6000L (tosa) and SL-5600 (poodle). After some discussion we decided that both machines will be sent to me. I will keep tosa for some time to resolve some of bugs, poodle will go to Mickeyl when we will meet in Berlin during OpenEmbedded developer meeting. Both machines are added into OpenEmbedded project devices.
As donor could not send them overseas I contacted Aman ‘TheMasterMind1′ Gupta (one of old time OpenZaurus developers) and he agreed to get them and resent to me. Last Friday I got mail from customs office that package wait for me. I went there, paid 22% VAT (110 USD) and got box with two Zauruses.
I plan to flash tosa to OpenZaurus 3.5.4 + upgrades and check what need to be fixed. Next I will check how poodle works but this machine is something which I prefer to not touch too much rather - it’s 2.4 support was already marked as ‘terrible, awful’ and we want to move into 2.6 kernel on it. I will check how both machines works with 2.6.17 and maybe will try to hack it a bit - time will show.
Marcin Juszkiewicz June 17th, 2006
OpenZaurus 3.5.4.1 is near to be released. Images was created and tested on all supported platforms (c7×0, akita, spitz/borzoi/terrier) and they work. Next step is generating feeds.
I will generate new feeds for 3.5.4.1 release. They will replace 3.5.4 ones also for any next releases.
So current situation looks like this:
- images are working on all platforms (thx to Mickeyl, CoreDump, RP and few other devels/users for testing)
- feeds need to be built (optimised for arm not armv5)
- images will be rebuilt from feeds and tested
- release of 3.5.4.1
I think that this will take about 1-2 weeks to get feed built.
Please send opinions to openzaurus-devel mailing list.
Status of building is available in OpenEmbedded Tinderbox as “ewi-OZ-3.5.4.1-feed”.
Richard 'RP' Purdie April 21st, 2006
The Poodle from Dow Hurst (which was used by John Lenz for the original 2.6 kernel work) has safely arrived into my care today.
Now I guess I have some work to do! :)
OpenZaurus team April 14th, 2006
Over the last few days we have been setting up a Wiki working so work on documentation/faq/howtos should be easier. Today I want to share this info with users.
OpenZaurus wiki is open and wait for your content here: http://openzaurus.berlios.de/ - join us and help to improve situation with docs. Link is also added in top menu bar.
Marcin Juszkiewicz April 14th, 2006
As you probably remember nearly two months ago users started thread on OESF forum about getting poodle machine for OpenZaurus team. Later I wrote to openzaurus-devel that we need developer which will work on getting poodle better supported.
Current situation is nice:
- Matthias ‘CoreDump’ Hentges will get poodle bought by users and work on getting 2.4 based images work better
- Richard ‘RP’ Purdie will get poodle from Dow Hurst (this machine was used by John Lenz to get 2.6 kernel on it) and will work on improving 2.6 kernel
I want to thanks ALL involved users for making this possible - OpenZaurus 3.5.4.x is going to be better and better.
Marcin Juszkiewicz April 3rd, 2006
Today I prepared new libqte2 packages rebuild for all OZ supported machines. Users of OpenZaurus 3.5.4/3.5.4.1 (OPIE flavour) are requested to install it and tell does it works or not for them. You can download them from this directory (you can use it as feed too).
We want to have it tested before it will be added into upgrades feed.
UPDATE: version upgraded to r32 should work OK on cxx00 Zauruses.
UPDATE: libqte2 r32 added into upgrades feed.
All this work cannot been done without patches from ROAD GmbH. Let me quote mail from Holger ‘zecke’ Freyther:
The ROAD GmbH was kind enough to give their fixes to the kernel-keymap patch back to the community. I finally found the time to merge these fixes back into our copy of the kernel-keymap.patch.
I’m glad we have fixes for:
- Workaround broken KeyMaps. This means no more ‘dead’ keyboards for Opie users yipee
- Fix handling of function keys
- Fix handling of NumLock keys
- Fix handling of Auto Repeats
- Handle keys > 7Bit
- Add Handling for ShiftL and ShiftR modifiers
- many more small fixes.
The keyboard support now is way more mature than it was before. I would like to thank the ROAD GmbH and I personally wish them good luck on their product and I sincerly hope they will release it soon!
Marcin Juszkiewicz March 31st, 2006
As many of people noticed Sharp released new model: Zaurus SL-C3200 which differ from C3100 only in keyboard color and microdrive size. We added this model to updater.sh used by spitz (C3000) and borzoi (C3100) images.
OpenZaurus 3.5.4.1-alpha1 should work on ‘terrier’ without problems - if someone notice any kernel problems then please report them - more info in that post.
BTW: we united all SL-C3×00 models into one in OpenEmbedded. Currently we use ’spitz’ as MACHINE for them - this will be changed to “c3×00″ in future. Akita (SL-C1000) will be separated from spitz/c3×00.
Marcin Juszkiewicz March 21st, 2006
It’s available from http://ewi546.ewi.utwente.nl/tmp/hrw/3.5.4.1-test/alpha1
Notes:
Spitz (sl-c3000) and Borzoi (sl-c3100) images are the same so we united them.
C7×0 machines have issues with sound which will be fixed before release.
test it and report bugs, fixes, ideas:
- OE Bugtracker: http://bugs.openembedded.org/
- GPE Bugtracker: http://handhelds.org/bugzilla/
- OPIE Bugtracker: http://opie-bugs.oszine.de/
All feedback goes to openzaurus-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Kernel modules are provided in modules/ subdirs. You can use them as a feed:
src/gz c7x0 http://ewi546.ewi.utwente.nl/tmp/hrw/3.5.4.1-test/alpha1/c7x0/modules
src/gz akita http://ewi546.ewi.utwente.nl/tmp/hrw/3.5.4.1-test/alpha1/akita/modules
src/gz spitz-borzoi http://ewi546.ewi.utwente.nl/tmp/hrw/3.5.4.1-test/alpha1/spitz-borzoi/modules
Ofcourse select proper one ;)
Marcin Juszkiewicz March 18th, 2006
On behalf of the OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus, Opie and GPE teams, I am proud to present to you the fourth OpenZaurus release based on the BitBake build system and the OpenEmbedded metadata repository.
The highlights of this release are:
- OPIE 1.2.1
- GPE 2.7
- Cross SDK provided
- Native SDK provided
- WPA support on all machines
- Linux Kernel 2.6.14-rc1 for C7×0
- nearly 3000 source packages which result in 12000 packages to install
- Various corrections to keymaps for all machines have been made
- Fixed keyboard repeat on c7×0 machines
- Suspend/resume issues on collie, poodle, tosa have been fixed
- Bluetooth improvements all over the place, especially in the base system
- some 802.11g CF cards probably work now
- Enlightenment DR 17 images (experimental)
This release supports the following Sharp Zaurus models:
- collie (SL-5000, SL-5500)
- poodle (SL-5600, B500)
- tosa (SL-6000)
- c7×0 (C700, C750, C760, C860, SL-7500)
Due to a lot of problems with 2.4.20 on cxx00 machines we have decided to not release 3.5.4 for those machines. It does not makes sense to release 3.5.4 with crappy cxx00 support and then lose our reputation when some weeks later we could have 3.5.4.1 with proper cxx00 support.
You can help to speed up development by donating money and/or devices to our developers. Compared to other open source projects we receive very few donations, although we spend a lot of our precious spare time and deliver lots of good work. So if you are regularly using OpenZaurus, consider donating developers.
See the ReleaseNotes for important notes before you install OpenZaurus 3.5.4.
Also see Installation for Installation instructions.
Marcin Juszkiewicz
OpenZaurus 3.5.4 Release Manager
Marcin Juszkiewicz March 6th, 2006
I want to inform all of you that I tagged OpenZaurus 3.5.4 in .oz354fam083 branch.
What does it mean for you:
- if you are user then you will get OpenZaurus 3.5.4 soon (few days)
- if you are OE/OZ developer then you can start working on OZ 3.5.4.1 :)
What was changed in OpenZaurus 3.5.4? List is too long to be even created but I want to note few things:
- OPIE 1.2.1 (with lot of hires fixes made after 1.2.1 release - mostly by me :)
- GPE 2.7 (also with some fixes which was done after 2.7 release)
- 2.4.18 kernels with APM fixes so no more suspend/resume problems
- WE18/WE19 in kernels so WPA should work out-of-box
- cleaned pcmcia configs so CF cards should work out-of-box too
- some of 802.11g CF cards probably will work
- Enlightenment DR 17 images (experimental)
Now we need to start build machine and after few days we will release it.
OpenZaurus 3.5.4 test program is closed now.
REMIND: Due to lot of problems with 2.4.20 on cxx00 machines we decided to not release 3.5.4 for those machines. It does not makes sense to release 3.5.4 with crappy cxx00 support and then lose again our reputation before some weeks later we could have 3.5.4.1 with proper cxx00 support.