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[Axiom-developer] Re: Axiom on Zaurus SL-6000 under Debian - success!
From: |
Camm Maguire |
Subject: |
[Axiom-developer] Re: Axiom on Zaurus SL-6000 under Debian - success! |
Date: |
13 Oct 2004 16:49:12 -0400 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.2 |
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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