OpenZaurus

OpenZaurus is a replacement OS for the Sharp Zaurus SL5000 or SL5500 that offers a number of enhancements over the stock Sharp offering.

OpenZaurus uses Opie, a fork of the Qtopia desktop supplied by Sharp, which can be customised by the user. Here are a couple of screenshots of some wallpapers I created for my Zaurus, click on the images for larger sized versions. Or you can download all 6 here (850KB).

Mounting NFS exports

Mounting NFS exports under OZ seems to require the "nolock" option for it to work properly..

mount -t nfs -o nolock sat802:/home/ottaky/zaurus /mnt/sathome/

.. mounts an export on my Satellite onto my Z. Omitting the "nolock" option means the command will take a very loooong time to complete, if at all.

Ash

The default shell for OZ appears to be ash, which is similar to, but less functional than, bash. I've added the following line to /root/.profile to give me a more useful shell prompt.

export PS1='\u@\h:\w> '

This works for terminal, konsole and ssh sessions.

Kismet

I'm running kismet 2.8.0b which I grabbed from Justin Huff's website, here, and a QT front end for kismet, available here. The OZ terminal allows proper colour and can be rotated to give a more usable display for kismet. Alternatively, you can terminate Opie and run kismet from the root terminal which is far larger.

SSH

SSH is included in the default OZ installation and keys are generated upon first boot. Telnet is disabled by default.

USB

Many people seem to have problems with the USB connectivity between Linux and OZ. I use my WLAN to sync and communicate with the Zaurus, so I've disabled the USB side of things. Commenting out the usbdmonitor entries in /etc/modules and /etc/modules.conf prevents the USB modules from loading at boot, saving a few KB of memory.

Dialup with IrDA

I have a Nokia 6210 mobile that incorporates a modem. OZ can be configured to communicate with the 'phone over infrared and dial in to my ISP. This is not as straight forward as with the Sharp ROM, but once it's been configured, it works fine.

Before you start, you'll need to load the IrDA applet. Go to the Settings tab and start Launcher and then verify that the Irda box is checked.

The manual configuration requires the creation and editing of some files in /etc/ppp. This can be done either in a console on the Zaurus, or via an SSH session.

Create /etc/ppp/chatscript.isp, and put this into it:

ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
ABORT 'ERROR'
ABORT 'NO DIAL'
"" ATe1
""
ATZ0
OK
"ATDT 08457560000"
CONNECT

Be sure to replace 0845756000 with the telephone number for your ISP.

I then renamed /etc/ppp/options to /etc/ppp/options.old and created a new, blank, /etc/ppp/options file with this in it ..

lock
modem
crtscts
asyncmap 0
mtu 1524
mru 1524
noipdefault
ipcp-accept-local
ipcp-accept-remote
noauth
defaultroute
debug

I then created a /etc/ppp/chap-secrets with this in it ..

# Secrets for authentication using CHAP
# client        server  secret          IP addresses
"USERNAME"      *       "PASSWORD"

Obviously, you need to supply your own USERNAME and PASSWORD. Once this is done, activate the IrDA applet on the Zaurus, and place it into discovery mode. Once the phone is detected you can dial in using the following command line ..

/usr/sbin/pppd debug connect "/usr/sbin/chat -V -f /etc/ppp/chatscript.isp" user "USERNAME" /dev/ircomm 115200 -detach

You might want to put an "alias" in /root/.profile to give this command an easier to remember name ;-)

When connected, running ifconfig reports ..

irda0     Link encap:UNSPEC  HWaddr 3B-59-81-EC-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
          UP RUNNING NOARP  MTU:2048  Metric:1
          RX packets:490 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:1064 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:8
          RX bytes:5835 (5.6 kiB)  TX bytes:29240 (28.5 kiB)
          Interrupt:16

ppp0      Link encap:Point-Point Protocol
          inet addr:213.122.249.183  P-t-P:213.121.145.19  Mask:255.255.255.255
          UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:5 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:6 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:3
          RX bytes:50 (50.0 iB)  TX bytes:63 (63.0 iB)

clock

I noticed the date on my Zaurus was resetting to midnight on the 1st of January 2002 whenever I turned the Zaurus off and on again. You can use hwclock to sort this out.

mp3s

If you have a lot of mp3 files on an NFS mount on your Zaurus, you might want to try this perl script. If you're lucky it will recursively scan for mp3 files and create the required .desktop files on the Zaurus so that opieplayer can find them easily. There are some simple instructions at the top of the script. Use at your own risk, I tested it very briefly and it seemed to work but there are no guarantees. Make sure that the permissions on your mp3 files allow opieplayer to read them!

Links

OpenZaurus and Opie are great, but browsing the web can be a chore. I've installed a version of Konqueror on my Zaurus, which I think is a little bit better than the version of Opera that shipped from Sharp, but sometimes it's still a real pain to use on such a small screen. I recently installed SSL-Links, a text based browser that I use occasionally on my fullsized machines. It's great. Especially when I'm connected to the net through the 9600bps modem in the cell phone.

Wellenreiter

If you've ever been out sniffing for WLANs, you've most likely heard of or used Wellenreiter. It's a great tool, written in Perl, and now the clever folks at Remote-Exploit have written a non Perl based version for the Zaurus. Download from Wox.org.