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/
