Technology

Zaurus – English ROM

I bought a Sharp Zaurus 760 from Japan through one of my friends a couple of months back. This model is not sold in the US and I have been wanting to get my hands on it for a long time. I was well aware of the fact that the interface was all in Japanese, but since it runs Linux, I was confident of being able to hack it and change the locale settings. And there are a lot of enthusiast sites on the Internet which have information about this. Well, I got the PDA or rather Personal Mobile Tool (as Sharp likes to call it) and changed the locale settings by following the instructions in the following links
http://members.rogers.com/e46m3/zaurus/
http://downloads.conics.net/pda/zaurus-sl-c700/eng-inst/
http://www.zaurususergroup.com/index.php

Although I got most of the settings and menu options converted into English, I was still not satisfied. I wanted to modify the ROM to a complete english setting. Unfortunately, I am not such a Linux Guru (aspire to become one 🙂 ). Months passed by and as happens with such toys, it started piling dust until I came upon this site. They claimed to have a completely customized ROM with english. It was 11:00 PM in the night and the battery on the Zaurus was completely drained. Well, such goodies shouldn’t be kept waiting :). So I charged the batteries for ~ 15 minutes and got to work. Here is what I did

1) Download the ROM image from Cacko.biz.
2) Follow instructions found here.
3) Reboot the Zaurus and presto… you have an English ROM

Note: Apparently you cannot start up the Zaurus if your battery is completely dead although it is connected to an AC power source. You will have to wait at least 15-20 minutes for the batteries to charge up partially. Weird..

Here is a screenshot of the Zaurus running Netfront. It is connected to the Internet with a prism wireless card.
Zaurus :: Netfront :: BBC

That is the original screen size (640X480 pixels!!). Isn’t that impressive. I just cannot understand why Sharp doesn’t release these great PDAs in the US. They do have the Zaurus 5xxx series for sale over here.

Thanks to the Cacko Group, I now have an english version of the ROM. The same group has a X11 based distribution for the Zaurus. I will try that sometime next week. If you are having trouble getting to the main site (it is damn slow!!!), try this mirror site.

January 14, 2004 by Fun Technology Uncategorized 0

head

I was asked by one of my friends, how he could get the top 10 processes in a Unix system. I knew of the usual commands “top”and “ps” and never thought of how you could just get the top 10. Interestingly there is a command called “head“. So if you wanted the top 10 processes you would use “ps -auxw | head“. “man head” returns the following

NAME
head – output the first part of files

SYNOPSIS
head [OPTION]… [FILE]…

DESCRIPTION
Print first 10 lines of each FILE to standard output. With more than
one FILE, precede each with a header giving the file name. With no
FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

January 10, 2004 by Linux Technology Uncategorized 0

The Tao Of Security

I came across this blog by Richard Bejtlich while I was researching for security related sites. Richard is a principal consultant at Foundstone and his knowledge and methodology just amazes me. I visit this site everyday if not more :). I hope to add more bits about technology as I come across interesting things.

January 5, 2004 by Technology Uncategorized Web 0

New blogging software!

In the spirit of New Year, I decided to try a new blogging software . Apparently the one I used before is not being actively developed anymore. And WordPress is the continuation of the older B2 project. The interface looks a lot cleaner and it has a lot more features in the background. Only problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to import all my old posts. I did make a backup of the old database. Will try to see if I can manually import them. Isn’t life wonderful 🙂 .

January 5, 2004 by Technology Uncategorized Web 0

Sun[set or rise]??

You might have already noticed all the buzz being generated in the tech. world due Sun’s annoucement that is might have to write off 1 Billion [yeah, you heard that right] dollars for this quarter. A lot of people are saying that this is the start of the end. It is funny how bad decisions made by management can affect a company :). I always admired Sun for being a “technology” company, but in the last few years instead of being innovative and adopting to changing market needs, Sun stagnated. I mean, how many companies would think of going with Sun when they can get comparable technology [Linux+Inte/AMD] at a far cheaper price. What is wrong with people in the upper management? I have seen several companies go down just because of bad decesions by management. Do people loose their brains once they get there?? I do hope [if not for the shareholders, at least for the employees] that Sun can get its act together.

October 4, 2003 by Rantings Technology Uncategorized 0