zaurus:sharp mobile

The unit almost never has enough signal to have a proper connection when indoors in New York City. This is true even in areas where the analog cellular service is just fine for voice calls. The problem seems to be caused by the very small antenna the unit shipped with. In tests a properly sized 3/4 wavelegnth antenna offered superior performance compared to the supplied antenna.

While the charger for the modem is the same voltage as the charger for the Zaurus the connector is different. This means the road warrior needs to carry 2 chargers. Had some thought been given to the product one charger could serve both units.

The documentation states that the software must be installed in ram, not on an sd card. This type of statement is usually a warning flag that the packager was clueless. In this case that warning was very true. Upon installation of the supplied software in the Zaurus I tried it out. After a very short time the Sl5000D locked up forcing a full power off to regain control of the unit. At boot there were messages from the supplied Aether Systems software indicating indicating the inability to find shared libraries. What followed was 3 hours of uninstalling and attempting to re-install the supplied software.

The installs all failed due to lack of disk space on the internal (ram) disk. It seems that the un-install procedure did not remove all the files, and there was no room left on the internal disk to extract and install the packages.

I decided to use ipkg at the command line to install the supplied packages in a directory on my SD card. I then used find to generate a list of files that I used to clean out the files from these packages that were still lingering on the internal storage. This gave me 1.5Mb of free space in /home. I now at least had a usable, if you can call a machine that locks up many times a day usable, zaurus again.

I looked at the files in the extracted distribution and quickly saw why the docs said to install them only to ram. Who ever wrote the startup scripts for /etc/rc.d/ had no idea how to write a proper shell program. Some quick fixes to the bugs in the scripts and some additions to take into account the actual location of library and binary files installed with these packages and it was time for another try. I symlinked the /etc/rc.d scripts to the rc5.d directory, rebooted the system and inserted the CDPD modem. The system booted, and following the supplied documentation I was able to browse the web very slowly. An ssh connection to one of my systems was so slow it was unusable.

With the CPDP card removed form the system I found that I was getting out of memory errors doing things that I had previously had no trouble with. A quick ps showed several copies of aimd and aeproxy running. It seems that the software sharp mobile insists on starting at boot time is just a proxy server with propriatory compression. Why do the Sharp Mobile and Aether folks think a system with limited memory should be running proxys when the card is not installed is beyond me!. I have of course disabled the boot time start of the proxy processes and only start it when I am using the card. The start/stop of these processes should really happen on insert/eject of the CDPD card.

When will companies like Sharp and Aether get a clue and hire Unix skilled folks for Unix projects?

I am overhauling the supplied software, but probably will not be able to release it due to copyright restrictions.

It seems that QPE was being killed and restarted after suspend/resume cycles due to the supplied Sharp Mobile software being installed on the SD. It seems that the little white icon at the bottom of the Zaurus screen is from an applette that is linked into QPE at run time. The SD manager software thinks that on resume it must kill QPE since it has the applet open, and then unmount and remount the SD. This can be looked at as both a bug with the Sharp Mobile software and a problem with the SD manager.

It seems to be a waste of memory and cpu horsepower to link the applet that allows one to change e-mail and proxy settings into the QPE desktop application. It would make much more sense to set up a tab on the system that would have in it the enfora modem manager, a proxy controler, and a small program to do the work of this applet. Sure it looks cool to always have your own private icon on the screen, but this is a system with very limited resources!

The SD manager must also be considered at fault because it should not be trying to kill processes, or unmounting and remounting a filesystem just because of a suspend/resume transition.

Testing on 2002/04/30 also in Park Slope Brooklyn gave a download speed of 300Baud. A 1MB file would take 7.3 hours to download. Something has to be done to get the speeds closer to the advertised 14.4Kbps. I can deal with ssh at that speed, but doing any TCP/IP work at 300 baud is almost like trying to empty Lake Michigan with a thimble.

The tab has 3 fields labled:

Server
Port
Service Type

I could have recovered these settings by re-installing the Sharp Mobile software, but I thought this would be info that tech support would have at the ready. After several minutes of trying to convince the first level support person that these even existed I got frustrated and asked for a supervisor when he told me I could not be talking about the supplied software. I had to wait a few minutes for the supervisor, but he knew exactly what I was talking about and quickly gave me the needed information.

Sharp Mobile Tech Support needs to be trained on the product!

I am going to make a note of the settings in a file on the Zaurus so I have ready access to the information next time this happens while I am in the field.