World of XorA

Have even managed to redirect the old RSS URL to the wordpress feed, so xorasfeed on LJ works again!

So thanks to a kind OE developer I got a Sheevaplug at cost. If you haven’t heard of the Sheeva before its a Linux device with 512M flash and ram, based on the Marvell Kirkwood CPU. All fitting inside a wall wart.

So I with some cursing removed the default Ubuntu and installed Ångström using UBIFS. Some cursing was caused by the Sheeva failing to work with my usb stick or with my SD cards.

I am impressed with UBIFS it totally blows jffs2 out of the water. Mounts in seconds instead of minutes and doesn’t irreparably break when disk space runs low.

So with some fixes in OE my sheeva is now plugged into a USB hard drive and happilly running Transmission to download torrents. The 1.2GHz processor is easily fast enough for a headless box. The enormous RAM is a dream to work with on an embedded device. I still have some more improvements to test and move into OE so Ångström can benefit from them. But all is good so far!

Ahah it was about time I upgraded the wordpress version I was using and re-enabling it.

As people who own zaurus machines will have already seen but just in case OpenZaurus is Dead.

Its been a fun few years since I first bought a 5500 collie and found that the Sharp rom was so limited, found the fledgeling OE project that could barely build stuff and started building my own packages one by one (as we had to in the old days). Since then I have upgraded the Zaurus twice, C860 and 3200. And OZ progressed into a fully functional system with thousands of packages.

But its now really dead, we have just moved onto Angstrom, this is a massive leap forward as its using the latest gcc, glibc and EABI. Making our systems smaller faster and even giving us debian compatability (well when they catch up anyway). So OpenZaurus is not really dead, its just grown up a little.

Well I spent the train journey to work this morning watching TNA on my c7x0 using Xv under X11.

This is due to “sirfred” and his amazing new xserver for the imageon chips,  http://www.openembedded.org/filebrowser/org.openembedded.dev/packages/xorg-xserver

I think this makes the c7x0 currently the coolest zaurus about.