Zaurus Developer

2011/1/31

As part of my effort to configure the Zaurus SL-C1000 I received from
Ishido, I decided to publish a collection of all the software
packages I'm installing as a defense against the link rot that is
increasingly corrupting public Zaurus software indices and as a
service to the remnants of the Zaurus hacker community[1].

To do that, it would be nice to be able to compile and package Zaurus
software on my own so I'm not at the mercy of executables and
packages put together years ago by people who have long since dropped
out of the Zaurus community.

My first step was setting up an on-board compiler on the Zaurus. On
my C860s I've used both Developer Image 1.5 and zgcc. I had wanted to
try Developer Image 1.6 (especially after the 1.5 package disappeared
from the Internet) because of its more extensive library and tool
collection, but was never able to because it depends on the squashfs
module (version 1.5 used cramfs) which I was never able to find for
the C860. Finally, I found a squashfs module for the C1000 (still no
luck for the C860), and now have Developer Image 1.6 up and running
on the new Zaurus and can compile Hello World in both C and C++.

Next, I tried learning how to roll my own Ipkg file. Although like
all steps of this exercise I had to struggle with documentation
that's incomplete, out-of-date, or missing, last night I succeeded in
packaging the ed editor and posting it to ELSIx[2].

Tonight, I got half-way to getting a cross-compiler for Zaurus
working on my laptop. I was able to compile the Qtopia example
application and run it in the Linux simulator. However, I'm running
into linker errors when I try to generate a Zaurus executable. I
suspect the solution will involve tucking-in a few back-level
libraries into the cross-compiler configuration (this was the trick
for getting the Linux native compile to complete), but I will have to
try again another day.


[1] http://www.oesf.org/forum
[2] http://www.elsix.org/