cross-preparing j820 userland on i386

[Faré]

Dear j820 hackers,

you can run your arm binaries with qemu on your favorite desktop and
help prepare a platform for your Z without suffering from the
limitations in size and speed of memory, disk and network that you
have with native installation!

First solution is to install qemu (on debian, that's apt-get install
qemu) and use apt-get as described in the following post (replacing
ppc and powerpc by arm):
http://lists.freegeek.org/pipermail/lessdisks/2004-July/000237.html

Also, in some cases (e.g. that don't rely on autodetecting things from
/proc), you can run arm binaries in a chroot, with a statically-linked
qemu. Here's how I did it. Sorry if mail client split lines.
NB: by using the builtin echo of zsh instead of /bin/echo, I messed
things up badly (with the \x00 being eaten... ouch!) and had to reboot
for I couldn't exec anything anymore and didn't know how to cancel the
misregistered binfmt_misc entry.

$ apt-get source qemu
$ cd qemu-*
$ ./configure --static --target-list=arm-user
$ make
$ cp arm-user/qemu-arm ${ARM_TOP_FOR_CHROOT}/lib/qemu-arm
$ /bin/echo ':arm:M::\x7fELF\x01\x01\x01\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x02\x00\x28\x00:\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\x00\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xfb\xff\xff\xff:/lib/qemu-arm:'
> /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register

PS: oleg, the image you published on the site doesn't allow for dpkg
to run. Ouch. I'll have to retry based on powerworkstation or some
such...

PPS: my second j820 died. Looks like a mechanical failure. In an
unpredictable way, the contact would loose, and then the machine would
stop responding while the screen would become wild. If you have an
idea what went wrong, or if you know how to salvage parts from the
machine, I can send you the non-working unit. I'm now using my last
machine. If/when it dies, I intend to stop using the j820 and instead
acquire whichever latest and greatest Zaurus there is. The SL-C3000
looks just great.

Cheers!

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
     There are two kinds of people, those who do the work
and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group;
there is less competition there
                -- Indira Gandhi.