John's little old Zaurus page, ca. 2006

(not to be confused with John's little new Zaurus page)

Years ago I picked up a Sharp Zaurus SL-C760 and absolutely love it. I immediately flashed the OS to pdaXrom 1.1.0rc8 (now rc12) and now have a complete GNU/Linux/X11-based email/web/LaTeX computer that fits easily in my pocket, has a 6+ hour battery, is instant-on, and has no harddrive to wear out.

Along the way I've found just a few small gaps in the software available for pdaXrom rc8, and have done my best to fill them in:

xdvi needed recompiling
many non-rc8-compiled apps needed older libraries
to access the FileMaker server at work I needed Konqueror
various Palm syncing apps
a fellow recent rc8 convert asked about OCamL
the mplayer plugin for Firefox/Mozilla lets you access web-only media feeds e.g. game radio in windows-media format from NHL.com. [NHL.com as since changed their streaming format so this no longer works, alas.]

xdvi

In this "bin" file you'll find Xaw- and Motif-based binaries of xdvik compiled on a pdaXrom 1.1.0rc8-equipped Zaurus. They're meant to go with the ztex TeX distribution; just install ztex as its instructions say, then unpack this newer xdvi over top of it, keeping the pathnames as they are (i.e. do it from the "/" directory, just as you had to for ztex).

To use the Motif-linked binary instead of the standard Xaw one, just edit your /usr/share/texmf/xdvi/xdvi.cfg to point at xdvi-motif.bin instead of xdvi-xaw.bin. If you're running pdaXrom 1.0.5 you won't need this newer xdvi, as the one what comes with ztex should work fine.

bibtex

For bibtex, I just grabbed bin.tar.gz and lib.tar.gz from here, and took the bibtex binary + libkpathsea.so.3 from them.

Sources for this and all apps hosted on this site are available here in accordance with the GPL, LGPL and XFree86 Licences. Package binaries are in my feed.

older libraries

In order to get binaries compiled for older versions of pdaXrom to run on 1.1.0rc8, you often need either to recompile from sources (which isn't always possible) or to install older versions of the standard libraries. Nothing mentioned above should need them, but for e.g. the gs tarball that Zazz distributes along with the ztex I mentioned earlier does need them.

To use the ones I've collected, install oldlibs_1.1.0rc8_armv5tel.ipk which contains a wrapper script called /usr/local/bin/oldlibs. Or, for example if you've already installed Zazz's gs package as he instructed, create a file /usr/local/bin/gs containing the following code:

#!/bin/sh
export LD_PRELOAD=/lib/libgcc_s.so
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/oldlibs
exec /usr/share/ghostscript/8.14/bin/gs "$@"

... then do a chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/gs to make it an executable, and then the command "gs" should run ghostscript for you. You can generalise this to other older binaries. (The "$@" causes command-line arguments that you type to be passed along to /usr/share/ghostscript/8.14/bin/gs).

I got the libraries contained therein from the libc, xlibs & tetex-bin packages of Debian's woody distribution.

Konqueror

Here are the results of my efforts to get the Konqueror webbrowser running on pdaXrom 1.1.0rc8, so that I could connect to a FileMakerPro7 server at the office that Gecko-based browsers don't seem to play nice with. It works great!

Konq/E ipk: konqembedded3_0.2_armv5tel.ipk [1744k]
QT3 libraries: qt3libs_3.3.3-8_armv5tel.ipk [2661k]
pcre library ipk: pcre3_3.4-1.1_armv5tel.ipk [28k]

Be sure to remove pdaXrom's pcre ipk before installing the above; this one includes libpcreposix with PCREPOSIX_REGFREE defined.

Sources for this and all apps hosted on this site are available here in accordance with the GPL, LGPL and XFree86 Licences. Package binaries are in my feed.

Palm syncing apps

I didn't compile any of these, I just packaged them up (if even that). To get any of these to talk to the Palm over IR, I have to first do the following commands:

    setserial /dev/ttyS1 0xXXXXXX
    irattach /dev/ttyS1 -s 1
    setenv PILOTPORT /dev/ircomm1
    setenv PILOTRATE 115200

I use tcsh; those of you using other shells with have to use the appropriate commands to set the environment variables similarly. To determine 0xXXXXXX for your Z, use dmesg to look in your boot messages for the address of the port that's attached to IrDA.

pilot-link (includes libpisock8) [Thanks Strijar]
malsync (requires libpisock8, available in the above pilot-link)
jpilot (includes libpisock4) and jpilot-plugins
PalmOS5 device owners can try the newer packages from neonbox.org, but I couldn't get that jpilot to play nice with my PalmOS4.1 m505.

OCamL

If you're looking for OCamL for pdaXrom, this might do the trick for you: ocaml_3.07.2a_armv5tel.ipk [5.4MB]. You'll need to install pdaXrom's tcl, tk, & ncurses packages as well. Note that I know nothing of OCamL and haven't tested this at all! I just compiled it and packaged it up.

Sources for this and all apps hosted on this site are available here in accordance with the GPL, LGPL and XFree86 Licences. Package binaries are in my feed.

MPlayer Plugin

I love my Zaurus. I love pdaXrom. I love listening to Red Wings games on the radio -- but NHL.com's game-radio streams are in windows media format only. This plugin allows me to love all 3 things at the same time!