Reverting a Zaurus to the Original Sharp Settings
Back to normal. Or at least to the original, Sharp-supplied software.
A few months ago, I installed OpenZaurus on my Zaurus SL-C3100 handheld computer, but I was never really happy with it. This week, I spent a frustrating evening reverting the machine to factory settings. Just in case someone out there might want to do something similar, here's how I pulled it off.
The Problem with OpenZaurus
"Upgrading" from the Sharp ROM that the machine ships with to OpenZaurus seemed like a good idea on paper: a more modern desktop, sorry, palmtop environment (a recent Opie instead of a somewhat old Qtopia); a more recent kernel; and, I thought, a larger selection of applications. That last bit may or may not be true, but all in all, the reality was not so cut and dry.
The Opie environment and the Konqueror Embedded web browser were swell; other things, not so much. The biggest problem was that the volume applet didn't seem to do anything, so I had to use the terminal program alsamixer a lot. I also never managed to get full-screen video to work, or to figure out how to close the lid while the music player was running without suspending the machine. I even had to make an ugly hack to get software package management to work. (The package manager was, in itself, great, but it used wget to download stuff, and the busybox version used under OpenZaurus didn't understand all the command-line switches so I had to hack up a script that pretended to be wget, discarded the offending switches and invoked the actual program. Yuck.) And I missed the neat "combined English and Japanese" feature more than I thought I would. So, rather than moving ahead and trying out the latest and greatest Ångström, I decided to go back to the trusty old Sharp ROM.
Reinstalling the Sharp ROM
I found these instructions, but following them only got me halfway towards my goal. After I had completed the process outlined on that page, my Zaurus booted nicely — the first time. I then applied the patch to switch the language setting from "all Japanese" to "combined English and Japanese," and Qtopia told me to reboot the machine to make the changes take effect. So I did, and now the trouble began.
Starting up, the Zaurus cried out, "Error! HDD is not initialized!", and then seemed to hang, or wait for me to do something. I pressed a few keys, but nothing happened. I tried Ctrl-C, and the boot process seemed to continue normally, except when Qtopia started, it said something to the effect that I was not allowed to run NetFront (the web browser) on this machine (sorry, I never made a note of the exact error message). Various things no longer worked, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Oh, and failed experiments, and reboots, and googling. But eventually, I found a trick that worked.
Missing System Files
Buried in this forum thread, about a third of the way down the page, is a description of how the hard drive needs to be set up — with hdd1 and hdd2 partitions of 9.5 MB each and an hdd3 occupying the rest of the drive — and links to some files that need to be in the /.sys directories on the hdd1 and hdd2 partitions. With those files in place, my Zaurus was happy again.
In Hindsight
Apparently, I could have spared myself a whole lot of trouble by using the Backup/Restore program (under the Settings tab) to create a backup, but I never put any data on the machine before I installed OpenZaurus on it, so I never bothered. I never realized that not just user data were backed up, but those all-important /.sys directories as well (actually, it seems the backup only includes the one on the hdd2 partition).
Well, live and learn. At least everything seems to work now. And this time, I have saved a backup.