"How-to" step by step: Running GRASS on the Zaurus SL5500

by Brian J Perrault, MIT Lincoln Laboratory

GRASS on ZAURUS

Image: GRASS on Zaurus (Photo: Luis E. Menoyo, U.S. Geological Survey)

See here for GRASS 6 on Zaurus

Before beginning, it is desirable to have either a SD or CF card for storage purposes.  This will come in handy when the mapsets you are interested in using won't fit in the internal storage of the Zaurus.  Note that if you are going to use an SD card with the Zaurus, it needs to be formatted as ext2, to enable symlinking.  This can be done in /sbin with "mkfs.ext2"

There is a list of SD and CF cards which will work with the Zaurus, available here
http://www.zauruszone.farplanet.net/howtos/managing_sd_cf_howto.shtml
I have chosen a Sandisk 128mb SD card.  They are commercially available from Microwarehouse.

In the installation process, ipkg may occassionally complain about "read-only" errors.  Many of the ipkg's available have been setup for iPaq's, not Zaurus', and as such the default installation directory is often set to part of the read-only space on the Zaurus.  This problem is solved by using the -d option, followed by the location where you would like the files to reside.  For example, you might try

ipkg -d /mnt/card install libncurses5.ipk

instead of

ipkg install libncurses5.ipk

Required for Grass on the Zaurus (in installation order): Qpe-terminal (available here
http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/showdetail.php?app=172 )

Install terminal through the add package interface in QTopia.  All of the rest of the packages should be installed from within Terminal using the "ipkg install" method.

Libncurses 5 (available through Ipkg find)
Zlibg (available through Ipkg find)
Xfree86 and Icewm for Zaurus (available here
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=39939&release_id=75364
)

Grass iPaq binary
http://grass.itc.it/grass5/binary/ipaq_linux/

There have been some reported errors related to "awk: not found" when exiting Grass from within Qtopia, and as such, it might not be a bad idea to install Gawk as well, which is also available through ipkg find.

To run Grass, reboot the Zaurus, when you get to the "wait... 5" line, hit the "/ ?" key once, which will bring you to a propt to select boot mode.
Hit "a" to enter the Linux Console mode.  From within the console, type "wm" to start x.

Once you are in x, you can run grass from within a terminal window.

Note that the "esc" key is mapped to "On/Off/Cancel" and "Ctrl" is mapped to "Fn".

That should get you to the point where you can open raster map layers.

Following is a list of what I'm working with:
 
OS and Hardware:
     Sharp Zaurus 5500 running Linux Kernel  2.4.6-rmk1-np2-embedix   -
ROM version 2.37
     256Mb CF card
 
 Installed packages:
     ZGCC
         gcc_bin.zip
         gcc_include.zip
         gcc_lib.zip
     zlib_1.1.2_arm.ipk
     libjpeg62_6b_arm.ipk
     libncurses_5_0_arm.ipk
 
 For X-Windows:
     x11zaurus_0.8_arm.ipk
     ice_1.0.9-5_arm.ipk
 
 I have additionaly downloaded for compiling GRASS:
     babyGRASS_compile.sh
     babyGRASS_packagingsrc.sh
     grass5.0.0pre5_src.tar.gz
 
 Missing items as per the 'REQUIREMENTS' documments in CVS-GRASS are:
     flex
     bison

___________________
Brian J Perrault
Group 99
Advanced Space Systems and Concepts
MIT Lincoln Laboratory



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