This page is dedicated to my Sharp Zaurus C1000.
I ordered my Zaurus from pricejapan.com. I used moneybookers.com to transfer the funds over as this was the cheapest option. I was very impressed with the service from pricejapan. The person I dealt with responded quickly to my emails. It only took a few days to receive the package. Here is a copy of the DHL tracking log:
October 22, 2005 11:23 Tokyo - Japan Shipment picked up October 22, 2005 21:22 Tokyo - Japan Departed from DHL facility in Tokyo - Japan October 22, 2005 21:24 Tokyo - Japan Arrived at DHL facility in Tokyo - Japan October 23, 2005 02:04 Tokyo - Japan Departed from DHL facility in Tokyo - Japan October 23, 2005 16:55 London-Heathrow - UK Arrived at DHL facility in London-Heathrow - UK October 23, 2005 17:10 London-Heathrow - UK Processed for clearance at London-Heathrow - UK October 23, 2005 17:14 London-Heathrow - UK Clearance processing complete at London-Heathrow - UK October 23, 2005 19:18 London-Heathrow - UK Clearance processing complete at London-Heathrow - UK October 23, 2005 19:18 London-Heathrow - UK Departed from DHL facility in London-Heathrow - UK October 23, 2005 19:37 London-Heathrow - UK Arrived at DHL facility in London-Heathrow - UK October 24, 2005 05:42 London-Heathrow - UK Departed from DHL facility in London-Heathrow - UK October 24, 2005 06:15 London-Heathrow - UK Arrived at DHL facility October 24, 2005 09:23 London-Heathrow - UK With delivery courier October 24, 2005 18:54 London-Heathrow - UK Scheduled for delivery October 25, 2005 09:08 London-Heathrow - UK With delivery courier October 25, 2005 10:49 London-Heathrow - UK Shipment delivered
The Zaurus is supplied for a Japanese market so there was some work to do before I could use it in the UK. This involved:
To convert my Zaurus into English I followed the instructions in this document. The file I used to restore is here. The only complication I had was trying to work out how to get the file onto an SD card. In the end I borrowed a PocketPC device and bluetoothed it over to the card. I should have bought a cheap USB-SD converter!
To make my Zaurus useful I needed:
The reason I bought my Zaurus was simple, it runs Linux! I am not really interested in using it as a PIM but rather as a pocket computer that can run portable code. This is my first dabble in the world of embedded computing. I am currently playing around with Scheme and using the excellent Chicken implementation. I have compiled Chicken release 2.2 for ARM. The tarball can be found here. It contains the interpreter, plus all the other binaries/files, including the compiler. I have only tested the interpreter as I have not got an on board gcc compiler on my Zaurus. I would be interested to hear from anyone who has tried the compiler and perhaps attempted to build an egg locally. I have not created an easy installable package but to get the interpreter working was just a matter of copying over the binary plus library with correct symbolic links.
john@zaurus john> csi _______ _ __ / ___/ / (_)___/ /_____ ___ / /__/ _ / / __/ '_/ -_) _ ___/_//_/_/__/_/_\__/_//_/ Version 2, Build 2 - linux-unix-gnu-arm - [ dload ] (c)2000-2005 Felix L. Winkelmann #;1>
N.B. This build has been optimised for the Intel XScale processor and was built with gcc 2.95. The build process needed a slight hack to cross compile successfully because Chicken attempts to run an ARM binary during the build. There is no problem building using scratchbox with gcc 3.x, however, the stock Sharp ROM requires gcc 2.95.
contact: jptmoore at mac dot com
updated: Fri Oct 28 22:04:41 BST 2005
