My "new" Zaurus 5500
====================

I am have been trying to make my "new" 5500 usable (if not useful). The
main  reason is  my  desire  to properly  test  the Sharp  CompactFlash
camera. It does work with more newer  Zauri but the it fits 5500 better
and there  are also SW-related issues  on them. I am  also curious what
can be done on this machine with a very limited storage, a slow CPU and
an extremely tiny keyboard (it  has also screen with resolution 320x240
but it is not worse than the first iPhones had many years later).


Operating System ("ROM")
------------------------

First of  all, I finally  find the Cacko/Crow ROM.  The Cacko is  a ROM
which is fully  compatible with original ROMs created by  the Sharp but
it includes  many fixes and  improvements (better support  for external
and add-on  hardware, better  Zaurus hardware control,  better language
support, more software  and so). My 5500 came  with something different
and incompatible with Sharp stuff so I had to replace it.

The problem  is that the Cacko  is designed for more  modern clam-shell
Zauri and for the poor old 5500 it had to be heavily modified (the 5500
has portrait-oriented screen and a very  small FLASH ROM so many things
had to  be moved to  the SD card). So  the modified Cacko/Crow  is much
less  common and  harder to  find [1].  Even at  [1], some  add_ons are
missing.

I got it, installed  it and (after many hours of finding  a SD which is
not bigger 1 GB  and is which not faulty...) finally  got a system that
works.

There are issues: the libtool and the ncurses library are missing (they
are  probable included  in the  now unavailable  extras package)  which
prevents installation of many packages  and usability of others (so the
Vim is useless, for example).

At the end I have solved the problem with ncurses by:
-------------------------------
ln -s ncurses.so.4 ncurses.so.5
-------------------------------
This is surely incorrect but it does work. Thus now I have working Vim.


Camera
------

But the important point is that the Sharp Camera card works!

The quality of pictures is not  high, of course. In my personal opinion
they are worse than pictures produced by the PalmPix (the add-on camera
for the Palm III by the Kodak). I also don't understand why there is no
possibility to take photos in 640x480 resolution (so high resolution is
only  possible in  portrait mode  as  480x640). There  is also  another
feature  which made  me confused:  one can  set the  focus. But  on the
screen the image still looks almost the  same. I tried to used it and I
made all pictures  blurred this way. So  I decided to set  the focus to
infinity.


Reference:

[1] https://www.oesf.org/repository/websites/cacko-crow/