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.
Now I’m charging Tosa — it’s huge but this screen is awesome! Now I understand why people want it in clamshells — Sharp do you hear it? Stop using screen from c700 and move to something new! I also played a bit with SharpROM (last time I used SharpROM over two years ago with my collie) and I can say that it looks nice but I feel slowdowns too often, weird behaviour on application close, handling QVGA apps is weird for me too. Too bad that I cannot test USB Host functionality — Sharp forgot to add proper cable and they are hard to buy (USB mini-A connector) but I found them in Trisoft offer so maybe will get it soon.
UPDATE: I contacted Trisoft and they will send me USB host cable for free. I also ordered one for our main tosa kernel hacker Dirk Opfer (also free). It is good that such companies exists — without them getting Zaurus and accessories in Europe would be hard.
During evening I plan to find time to flash tosa to OpenZaurus 3.5.4 + upgrades and check what need to be fixed. Too bad that wlan-ng driver for Prism2 USB lack WPA — I will have to lower security of my home AP — now it is WPA-PSK but will move to WEP so Tosa will connect with internal wifi. 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.