Sharp Zaurus

Upgrading the Distro on the SL-5500

Info here is gleaned from the links below, thanks very much to the authors of same.

My SL-5500 currently has a very old OpenZaurus distribution installed, and I've recently thought that I should resurrect this pioneering device with a more recent distribution.

Backup existing Zaurus installation

If there's anything on the Zaurus that you want - back it up!

Prepare a CF card

I'm going to try a CF card with multiple partitions. The first will be formatted vfat, the second will be formatted ext2, and the third will be swap.

It is important to start partitions on 1MB boundaries (i.e. multiples of 2048 512-byte sectors), in order to align 4kB filesystem blocks with flash erase blocks. There's a nice explanation of this logic at CollieInstall2010.

I will be using a 512MB compact flash card, so the partitioning will be as follows:

  1. kexecboot, 32MB, type 6 (vfat)
  2. root filesystem, 416MB, type 83 (ext2)
  3. swap, 64MB, type 82 (swap)

Here's the output from my interaction with fdisk:

> # My CompactFlash card is known as /dev/sdb on my desktop, your's may differ
> sync; umount /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb2
> fdisk /dev/sdb
>
> # Format the partitions.
>
> # Now mount them so we can copy files into them.
> mount /dev/hdb1 -t vfat /media/kexecboot
> mount /dev/hdb2 -t ext2 /media/angstrom-root

Install new software on CF card

On the first (vfat formatted) partition I will install kexecboot. This is the bootloader for the main kernel, which will be installed on the second (ext2 formatted) partition.

> # Copy the kexecboot image to the vfat partition
> tar xzvf blah
> cp blah /media/blah
>
> # Un-tar the distribution into the root directory of the ext2 partition
>
> cd /media/blah
> tar xzvf blah .
>

Building the latest

> git clone git://github.com/Angstrom-distribution/setup-scripts.git
> MACHINE=collie ./oebb.sh config collie
> MACHINE=collie ./oebb.sh update
>
> #Build the appropriate kernel for the SL-5500
> MACHINE=collie ./oebb.sh bitbake virtual/kernel
>
> #Build an image without the X11, gtk+, or qt windowing libraries
> MACHINE=collie ./oebb.sh bitbake console-image
>
> #Build > MACHINE=collie ./oebb.sh bitbake systemd-gnome-image
>
> #Build a GPE Palmtop Environment based kernel and rootfs
> MACHINE=collie ./oebb.sh bitbake gpe-image
> MACHINE=collie ./oebb.sh bitbake x11-gpe-image

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