Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 Instruction Manual page 163

my Zaurus SL-C3000 and SL-C3100
Using one of these bootloaders might be a way to boot and pivot the rootfs on the C3000 to
overcome the tiny 16M flash problem.
OpenZaurus vs pdaXrom - a distro for the SL-C3000
I am quite happy with Sharp ROM (with a bit of tweaking) on my SL-C3100 since it behaves the
way I like and does everything I want it to do. However, the SL-C3000 is a bit different since it got
a tiny flash. Hence I am looking for an alternate distro for the SL-C3000 which can run completely
off the internal MicroDrive.
The choice for a distro for my SL-C3000 is quite hard since none of the currently available distros
are quite ready yet. Since my SL-C3100 is already running a Qtopia based distro, I really want a
X11 based distro for the SL-C3000. There are two possible candidates, OZ/GPE and pdaXrom.
However, neither of the two has gotten to a point yet where it is stable enough to use and includes
sufficient useful applications and utilities. Both still have a lot of shortcomings.
Below is a discussion about why these two distros have potential and also where they fall short.
Firstly, the OS needs to be able to boot and mount the internal MicroDrive as rootfs. OZ does that
very well, however, pdaXrom does not officially support the C3000 so it needs to be hacked to do
that. Also, the perfect distro needs to fully support the SL-C3000 hardware and its many powerful
features.
I will compare the two most relatively stable version, GPE based on OZ 3.5.4.1 (2.6 kernel) and
pdaXrom 1.1.0 beta1 (2.4.20 kernel) rather than the most bleeding edge and experimental versions
such as Angstrom GPE (2.6 kernel) and pdaXrom r121 or later (2.6 kernel).
Hardware Support
The SL-C3000 has great hardware which more or less is supported by both distros. Here is a quick
summary of hardware and their level of support:
XScale CPU - both OZ and pdaXrom are optimised for XScale
CPU scaling and Power consumption - this is poorly supported on either distro
touch screen - both distro support touch screen
4 GB internal hard drive - supported by OZ by default, ie OZ runs off the harddrive. pdaXrom
requires hack to use harddrive but works just the same with hack
USB host capability - OZ has support for USB host, but common device drivers are not
automatically loaded. better supported by pdaXrom. USB storage is supported by both,
however, usb mouse and keyboard is better supported by pdaXrom
163 of 212
http://www.users.on.net/~hluc/myzaurus/
16/09/2007 12:23