Zaurus Tips & Tricks

Here you can find several tips and suggestions I found while upgrading my Zaurus SL-5500G (Codename Collie) from its original Sharp ROM to first the original OpenZaurus-ROM and then later the custom Hentges-ROM.

I stumbled across those tips all over the net and decided to copy them down here since I made the experience that information only linked to has the tendency to vanish when sites disappear into the nothingness. I tried to give proper credit to those who found this stuff out where possible, but I'm open to corrections, just drop me a note.

This wikinode is also listed at TuxMobil.org.

Opera 6 is not capable of displaying png-images on websites. So, instead of version 6 take a look at version 7.30, stripped right away from a newer Sharp ROM and available in the download section of the ZaurusUserGroup.

If your Opera wont start due to several missing ini-files, or will start but all the button-images are missing, link /opt/QtPalmtop/opera to /usr/share/opera by doing a ln -s /opt/QtPalmtop/opera /usr/share/opera. This should sove the problem.

If you need to use a proxy with Opera, you will soon find out that opera cowardly refuses to read the proxy settings from its ini-file. Thankfully, there exists a workaround for this matter. Create a file Proxies.conf like below and simply copy it to /root/Applications/Network/modules/ before you fire up Opera whenever you need to use the proxy. Remove the file when you want a direct connection.

[Info] 
[Properties] 
autoconfig = 
ftphost = 
ftpport = 
httphost = your.proxy.url
httpport = 3128 
noproxies = 
type = 2

Thanks to Nils Kemper for this useful information - I'd link to his original post on the opie mailinglist, but it has vanished although still being referred to in the archive. Weird.

In order to have the hardware keyboard mapped to german layout you have to install the keyz-zbk package, available here. Simply download keyz-zbk_0.5.6-1_arm.ipk and install it to your Zaurus. Then on the Settings Tab, open keyz configurator. Move the de.xml (and whatever other layout you might want to use) to the list of “Selected Keymaps” and assign a label to it. In the Launcher, activate the keyz applet. A restart of opie should be enough to get you a nice layout selector in your tray.

This post by arniel describes a fix for a common resume problem caused by compact flash cards. The suspended Zaurus freezes on resume or the cf card isn't properly recognized again. Short version would be to change your /etc/apm/suspend.d/S35cardctl so that it looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
#only use on 3600
. /etc/devdetect/identify.h3600
check_device
if [ "$?" != "0" ]; then
    # exit;                 # commented this line out
fi
# Suspend Cardctl
if [ -x /sbin/cardctl ]; then
    /sbin/cardctl eject     # changed this line from suspend to eject
fi

Another (additional) suggestion is to upgrade the hotplug and the pcmcia_cs packages, but since the first tip solved my resume problems I havent tried this out yet.

The technique described here is a step-by-step description of an adaption of the FamiliarLoopbackHowto by Nick Johnson. I fumbled around with it a bit and this is what turned out to work best on my zaurus flashed with an OZ3.3.6-pre1 system. If it doesnt work out for you, please take a look at the wikientry linked above. It is much more detailed and takes care of different setup possibilities. On your sd card create a file of the wished size and filename by using dd. In my case I wanted to have a 400MB filesystem and the command I typed in therefore was dd if=/dev/zero of/mnt/card/filesys bs=1M count=400. Next you'll have to create an ext2 filesystem in the created file. I did so by doing an mkfs.ext2 /mnt/card/filesys. Now try if you can mount the filesystem to a mountpoint of your choice: mount /mnt/card/filesys /mnt/test -t ext2 -o loop. If everything worked fine, you can start to make the necessary changes to automatically mount the ext2 sys to /mnt/card instead of the sd card.

First, mkdir /mnt/sd. Then edit /etc/sdcontrol

#!/bin/sh
#
# sdcontrol 1.0 2001/8/8 21:33:19 (Hideki Hayami)
#
# Initialize or shutdown a SD card device
#
# The first argument should be either 'insert' of 'eject'.
#
 
ACTION=$1
DEVICE=/dev/mmcda1
MOUNT_POINT=/mnt/sd                # change from /mnt/card to /mnt/sd
SMB_MOUNT=/home/samba/SD_Card
INSTALL_DIR=Documents/Install_Files
#FSTYPE="-t vfat"
FATOPTS="-o noatime,quiet,umask=000,iocharset=utf8"
EXT2OPTS="-o noatime"
 
###### for QPE ######
get_pid()
{
    echo $1
}
 
### and so on...

Edit /etc/fstab

/dev/mtdblock4 / jffs2 defaults 1 1 
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/cf auto defaults,sync,noauto,noatime,user,exec,suid,gid=100,umask=0002 0 0
/dev/mmcda1 /mnt/sd auto defaults,sync,noatime,user,exec,suid 0 0
tmpfs /var tmpfs defaults 0 0
# add this line:
/mnt/sd/filesys /mnt/card ext2 defaults,loop

Edit /etc/sd

#!/bin/sh
 
# rc.sd 1.00 2001/08/08 22:40:44 (Hideki Hayami)
#
# Tags for init configuration tools
#
# processname: sdmgr
# pidfile: /var/run/sdmgr.pid
# description: currently SD support is only for memory devices \
#              which is used as block device.
 
# Source function library.
# . /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions
 
MODULE=sharp_mmcsd_m
 
usage()
{
    echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|status|restart|reload}"
}
 
if [ $# -lt 1 ] ; then usage ; break ; fi
action=$1
 
case "$action" in
 
start)
    echo -n "Start SD services:"
    /sbin/modprobe $MODULE 2>/dev/null
    if [ -s /var/run/sdmgr.pid ]; then
        kill -0 `cat /var/run/sdmgr.pid` 2>/dev/null;
    else
        /sbin/sdmgr >/dev/null 2>&1 &
        RETVAL=$?
        [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && touch /var/lock/subsys/sd
    fi
    sleep 1
    echo " sdmgr."
    # make sure to mount the sd card and the ext2 file system
    mount /mnt/sd
    mount /mnt/card
    echo "Mounted sd card"
    ;;
 
stop)
    echo -n "Stop SD services:"
    killall sdmgr
    if grep -q $MODULE /proc/modules ; then
    /sbin/rmmod $MODULE
    fi
    rm -f /var/lock/subsys/sd
    echo " sdmgr."
    ;;
 
status)
    ;;
 
restart|reload)
    $0 stop
    $0 start
    ;;
 
*)
    usage
    ;;
 
esac
 
exit 0

You should be done.

My university, the TU Darmstadt, uses a cisco vpn system in order to control the access to the internal network and therefore internet via the internal network. So in order to be able to access some network, you first have to authenticate to the cisco server. The following represents a description of the way I finally managed to gain access to the net via the Zaurus and a D-Link DWL-660W wireless lan compact flash card.

Install

1. kernel-module-tun
2. vpnc
3. iproute

Create a file /etc/vpnc/mobiletu.conf with the following content:

Local Port 10000
Interface name vpntun
IKE DH Group dh2
Perfect Forward Secrecy nopfs
IPSec gateway vpngw1.net.hrz.tu-darmstadt.de
IPSec ID mobiletu
IPSec secret tu2go
Xauth username deinrbglogin@rbg_tud
Xauth password deinpasswort

If you want to be able to set up vpn connections from outside the TUD network as well, also create the /etc/vpnc/dialin.conf:

Local Port 10000
Interface name vpntun
IKE DH Group dh2
Perfect Forward Secrecy nopfs
IPSec gateway dialin.tu-darmstadt.de
IPSec ID mobiletu
IPSec secret tu2go
Xauth username deinrbglogin@rbg_tud
Xauth password deinpasswort

For those of you wondering why I am giving out passwords here: The configuration data of the vpn is available for the public at the VPN-Pages of the HRZ, therefore I don't see a problem in posting it here as well. The personal username and password to use in lines 8 and 9 is your hrz-account or similar, refer to the the listing of the existing RADIUS-Zones for further details. So for example if you have an RBG-account, the correct username is YourRBGUsername@rbg_tud and your password is your RBG-password.

In order to connect, simply type vpnc /etc/vpnc/mobiletu.conf at the shell.