[Axiom-developer] Re: Axiom on Zaurus SL-6000 under Debian - success!

[Camm Maguire]

Hi Bill! Great -- good to hear the good news!  Now you've got me
wanting a zaurus ....

Take care,

"Bill Page" <address@hidden> writes:

> With the help of Camm and Michael I have finally succeeded
> in building Axiom on Zaurus! Needless to say, it actually
> turned out to be really much easier than the path I took.
> 
> The problem in the end was just MEMORY - swap memory to
> be specific. I considered the options to use nfs or an
> external usb disk drive, but in the end I decided just to
> put the swap on a compact flash card. This was something
> that was not highly recommended in the Zaurus forums, but
> it is working great for me.
> 
> So what I have is this:
> 
>   Zaurus SL-6000
>     (the older ZL-5600 would also probably work)
>   1 Gbyte. SD memory card
>   256 Mbyte Ultra II CF memory card
> 
> The Ultra II is a new faster (10 Mbyte/sec) version of CF
> that also uses less power.
> 
> If you think that a Gbyte is more than enough beware that
> what you want to do with this machine will probably change
> as you learn more about it. Larger SD and CF cards are
> already available. By Christmas 2 Gbyte SD and 4 Gbyte CF
> ultra cards might well be available for what I paid for
> the above.
> 
> Debian and the entire development environment is on the
> SD card and nearly fills it. 128 Mbyte of the CF card is
> dedicated to swap space. But that is considerable overkill
> since the swap space never exceeded about 15 Mbytes during
> the build even though I was periodically using other programs
> simultaneously on the Zaurus.
> 
> The CF card is by default (off-the-shelf) formatted as
> a VFAT partition (Windows compatible). I know that unix
> people would probably advise reformatting it as an ext2
> unix file system. I had to use ext2 on the SD card for
> debian itself. But, pleasant surprize, running a swap
> file on VFAT seems to work. If it is more inefficient than
> ext2, then I can't really tell because CF is pretty slow
> anyway. I created the swap file with the command
> 
>       dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/cf/swap.img bs=1M count=128
>       mkswap /mnt/cf/swap.img
> 
> The commands that I added to the unix rc5.d startup just
> does 
> 
>       swapon /mnt/cf/swap.img
> 
> The only changes that I made to the Axiom build was to
> use --endable-locbfd and --enable-holepage=4*1024 in the
> initial GCL build. Then actually allows GCL to fit within
> the available real memory of the Zaurus without swapping.
> I cannot really say how much this small hole size affected
> the build time but I think that because swapping to CF is
> likely to be considerably slower than garbage collection
> in ram, I think this is probably a good compromise.
> Overall I would say that the total build time was probably
> about twice as long as it was the first time I ever built
> Axiom which was on a 266 MHz pc.
> 
> Anyway, none of this re-building was really necessary! All
> that was needed was just to add a little swap space. Now
> the debian arm binary runs fine. All I had to do was
> 
>   apt-get install gcl
> 
> and it works! The same is true of Axiom
> 
>   apt-get install axiom
> 
> Wonderful (of course it took me four days to get to say
> that  :) ...
> 
> Perhaps it is good to know that *if* one really needed too,
> it would be possible to re-build Axiom stand alone on the
> Zaurus. Actually with swap space allocated, it runs quite
> well in the background and does not interfere (much) with
> the PDA functions (email, calendar, etc.) of the normal
> Zaurus desktop. All you need is patience and a power supply.
> 
> A have to say again that I am really impressed by the
> Zaurus SL-6000. It has taken me a few months to realize
> that it really is like having a Linux desktop workstation
> in your pocket.
> 
>   http://pocketworkstation.org
> 
> It even comes with a X-window system that lets you run
> all X apps locally and/or from an external PC using VNC
> via wireless or usb connection. It's fast. There is a nice
> minimal windowing system called 'iceWM' but if you are
> really crazy nothing would stop you from added KDE or
> GNOME. Simply amazing (and terribly addictive if you have
> any geek tendencies at all).
> 
> Regards,
> Bill Page.
> 
> 
> On Tuesday, October 12, 2004 9:41 AM Camm Maguire
> address@hidden wrote:
> > 
> > I've heard one can also do this using the network block
> > device, aka. NBD, but do not (yet) have direct experience
> > myself.  It is said to be more reliable.
> > 
> > Michael Koehne <address@hidden> writes:
> > 
> > > Moin Bill & Camm,
> > > 
> > > > > Wondering if you can just setup a swapfile over nfs
> > > > > to see if the default binary will work for you.
> > > 
> > > > I am willing to try but I have never done this.
> > > 
> > >   swap over nfs is not trivial.
> > >   The usual trick is to wrap a loop device around the swapfile :
> > > 
> > >   on server :
> > >       dd if=/dev/zero of=/export/zaurus/swap.img bs=1m count=128
> > >       mkswap /export/zaurus/swap.img
> > >   on zaurus :
> > >       mount -t nfs server:/export/zaurus /mnt
> > >       /sbin/losetup /dev/loop0 /mnt/swap.img
> > >       /sbin/swapon /dev/loop0
> > >   to umount :
> > >       /sbin/swapoff /dev/loop0
> > >       /sbin/losetup -d /dev/loop0
> > >       umount /mnt
> > > 
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah