Re: new binary packages for NetBSD/hpcsh

[Michael Wileman <jwileman%panix.com@localhost>]

On Tue, 30 May 2006, Christer O. Andersson wrote:


> works fine, but 256MB is a bit too small. The extreme III is not

I'd say go for a gig at least. You'll want to play, and you'll need 
space. CF is cheap these days.

> > Lucent based WiFi's work right out the box with the GENERIC kernel.
> Cisco Aironet works with a custom kernel. You do need a 16 bit
> pcmcia card, the Jornada doesn't support 32 bit Cardbus.

My classic Orinoco Gold card works fine.

> > Are there binaries for this setup to enable things like e-mail, web
> > browsing, image viewing and word processing yet? Where do I find those?

There are two repositories of hpcsh binaries. Torsten's is at
http://www.atlas.uni-wuppertal.de/~harenber/NetBSD-hpcsh/ and
wrzymski's is at ftp://ftp.netbsd.pl/pub/pkgsrc/current/hpcsh/All/
The latter seems to be down right now, so try it later.

Otherwise you can compile yourself. I do this by booting and mounting 
and swap over nfs to avoid pounding on the CF card. Obviously you need 
a machine with an NFS server for this to work. Look in the list 
archives for info on how to NFS boot.

I use pine for email and elinks for surfing. I managed to get Gaim to 
compile, and it works OK once you get it set up for the small display, 
but I never managed to make gaim-encryption build. I've used the 
Jornada as a samba and ssh server.

> Most things that are supported for other platforms are supported
> for hpcsh. Of course the limited amount of RAM has a major impact
> on large applications. Most people run hpcsh without swap or with
> NFS mounted swap, that limits the usability of memory hogging
> programs as well. Even if you use a swap partition on your flash
> card it will be rather slow, and probably wear out you CF faster.
> You can find all kind of packages in the NetBSD packages collection.
> Either as source, or as binary packages at the site mentioned in
> the beginning of this thread. It is a bit slow to compile on the
> hpcsh.

Things that work slowly are anything with a heavy graphical interface. 
X works fine, but I use it mainly for xterms. Anything heavier than 
that will go very slowly, and will ultimately crash due to a memory 
error.

I use a swap partition on my flash drive, and haven't had any problems 
so far. Just don't try to run too many apps at once.

> I use mutt for email and links for browsing the web. I think I've
> read that xpdf works. Word processing I don't know. Text editors
> should work. Vi is included in the default install, but that is
> perhaps not word processing.

You can read word documents using antiword, but if you want to edit 
them, you might be better off with the Windows CE word processor.

Mike