Zaurus SL-5500 Software Archive
With OpenZaurus 3.2 my SL-5500 was as useful to me as most peoples iPhones and iPod touches.
The only major issue was the 1gb driver limit on SD cards, there was a wide assortment of accessories available in CF form factor.
My Zaurus is dead now so I will sadly not be testing any more Zaurus software.
The SL-5500's you find in a drawer or on ebay were nearly 10 years old when I fried my last unit.
Most of the thriving developer community and open source projects surrounding the once geek popular Z have dissapeared or moved to very low level development of buggy but completely open software, so I am doing a final wrap up of my Zaurus apps page in 2011.
This page used to be for my use when setting up a new Zaurus with the stable apps I needed for every day use.
You can see more apps if you browse the IPK directory but not all work as well as these listed here.
Like my Handspring Visor that had the memplug smartmedia card reader, modem pod, and a Xircom wifi pod, my Zaurus was a serious tool in its time period relevant and carried daily until broken.
It had Personal Mobile Tool stamped above the slide down keyboard cover, this was a good description of the Linux Zaurus.
It was very useful as a multimedia player, ebook reader, amateur com-sat tracker, and web browser when traveling light, or by bicycle before I had a netbook.
I had best luck using SSH to edit files and SCP to transfer files on and off the Z, it was great to wirelessly load up new songs for a long ride.
I am moving on to the Maemo/Meego Linux Nokia N900 which is almost everything I ever wanted to upgrade on the Zaurus
I will probably forget about this page or PTP will change servers again so grab these files while you can.
Enjoy and Share
Converting Video for Clean Running on Zaurus
ffmpeg -i video.avi -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500 -s 320x240 output.mpg
This will still sometimes crash the video player, especially if other programs are running.
Pause and skip will not work, you have to watch your movies all the way through
Converting Video to MP3 or OGG
ffmpeg -i video.avi output.mp3
ffmpeg -i video.avi output.ogg
There is a bug where if you turn on the IRDA port it will shunt the media player sound output to the very tinny buzzer speaker but the quality is terrible.
If you are IRDA connecting to a phone for GPRS start the media player first before connecting.
Software tested to run on OpenZaurus 3.2 Stable
Lynx Command line web browser, install to /usr/bin on your zaurus
ImageMagik Command line picture conversion program, symlink to /usr/bin
Midnight Commander Command line file management tool
Hebcal Calculates Hebrew dates and times from the comand line, converted .deb from ARM Debian stable
Edict Searches online dictionary databases
IRK Keyboard utility for PockeTop
Jcryptpad Blowfish encryption Pad, JVM required
JPortscan Scans machines for open ports, JVM required
Wapaka WAP browser, JVM like Jeode required, you may need to chmod it to executable, use wap.google.com searches as your portal for viewing other pages(Google has ended this service)
Perl Base
Perl Scripting language Perl Base required
PetitTrack a great satellite tracking program for amateur communications satellites helps you with exact doppler compensated radio frequencies on uplink and downlink and an audio alert 60 seconds before the satellite breaks the horizon. You need to make a TLE file from the two line orbit descriptors at for this progam to actually track satellites.
Nautik a program for several nautical computations, especially celestial navigation with a sextant, in German but easily converted with language file; requires Jeode JVM.
CIA nations of the wold database, a few years out of date, plop this directory onto your SD card and direct your web browser at the index.html file inside for linked offline pages on most nations of the world as of 2004.
Long term Almanac for Sun, Moon, and Polaris, again dump longterm.htm anywhere on your device and direct a java enabed web browser(on any device) at it to help calculate a fix from sextant readings absent a current nautical almanac.
thttpd Tiny web server, used to serve this page when my Z was alive
thttpdstart Start script for thttpd on OZ 3.2, put your index.html and files in the /root/usr/sbin directory, a very secure daemon but will not follow symlinks
Zgcc gcc compiler for your Zaurus (hundreds of files get installed, can slow other apps)
These are the files you will find missing once you switch to OpenZaurus
They are not open or free, no source code is available but they were included in the price when your Zaurus was purchased.
My non lawyer mind thinks if you have the hardware you also have a software license as these were not sold without this software.
When you need the richer features, MS file formats, or web site compatability they can be useful.
Opera 6 Web Browser (may need to be downloaded and installed locally) won't display most modern websites, try Hackaday's Retro website or this website.
Hancom Spreadsheet 1.0 View and edit old MS-Excel Spreadsheet files .xls format (if app crashes on load, use a small .xls test file for startup)
Hancom Presenter Viewer 1.0 View small Powerpoint files
Hancom Word 1.0 View and edit MS-Word .doc, .txt, and .rtf formats
Jeode Java Virtual Machine(JVM), Repacked for OZ 3.x, remember this will only execute ancient Java from the early 00s
My backup feed I am unable to actually test this feed but at least you can get the files for OZ 3.2 and make your own as tigger.smu.edu.sg server, the last OZ 3.2 mirror repository, one which I used as my primary ofter OZ deleted this last stable and fully compatible with the stock OS and software developed for that release, has gone away.
Get intrd.bin and select a zImage-xxxx renaming it to zImage. Put these files onto a CF card forematted to fat16, connect the power cord, open the battery bay, and push the reset button while holding the C and D keys. Mail and battery lights should light steady, this should take several minutes and will flash a Zaurus SL-5500 to OZ 3.2 the last stable release. The feed directory can be set in package manager to let you install OZ 3.2 software from the network.
3.2 was the last stable release for the OpenZaurus project before they changed direction and abandoned modifying the existing Sharp firmware. OpenZaurus has now merged with the Angstrom project and only releases untested SL-5500 apps if that. I never tested the Cacko distro for the SL-5500 but it was supposed to be pretty stable as well with good app feeds.
I am sorry but I no longer have any Zaurus hardware and my memories are too distant to help with any broken packages or bugs, this archive is only up for nostalgia's sake, I dont know of any other sites hosting this abandonware, but if you find a working Z they are pretty cool to play with; probably the best satellite tracker I have ever used too if you are not moving around.
Like I mention in the home page I am still using a Nokia N900 as my everyday pocket computer/phone with little hope of a proper replacement, for modern functional web browsing I have unhappiy settled with a Nexus7 tablet running LineageOS, no Gapps or Google services, and F-droid instead for software repos, Chromium seems the best FOSS browser to not break websites I need to use.