OpenBSD/zaurus

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Table of contents

• History of the port
  
• Current status
  
• Supported hardware
  
• Getting and installing
  

History

Shortly after Sharp unveiled its first Zaurus machines, some OpenBSD developers started dreaming of running OpenBSD on it, to have the smallest possible ssh-capable machine!

After the OpenBSD/cats was completed in order to benefit from a good ARM development platform, work on the Zaurus hardware started in 2004. Since the Zaurus is a fully capable machine, we no longer cross compile. All builds of Zaurus are done on the Zaurus directly. (The shared "arm" packages are nowadays built on the armish platform, because it is faster.)

Current status

Hardware support is mostly complete and quite stable. The Zaurus boots multiuser, X11 runs, and device support is being constantly improved. Most PCMCIA/CF devices work (such as wireless/ethernet cards), as well as host USB, SD/MMC memory cards and the keyboard and touch screen are supported by X11. Audio playback is working, and the machine is of course able to suspend much like a regular laptop. Even the processor performance mode can be adjusted with apmd(8), just like on other platforms.

Supported hardware

• Zaurus SL-C3000 (Spitz) / SL-C3100 (Borzoi) / SL-C3200 (Terrier)
• Intel PXA27x ARM cpu at 416MHz.
• 64MB of ram.
• com(4) standard and infrared serial ports.
• lcd(4) display panel, supporting wscons(4) console which supports X Windows.
• zts(4) touch screen acting as wsmouse(4) mouse controller.
• zkbd(4) native keyboard.
• pxapcic(4) PCMCIA slot, supporting most CF-sized pcmcia(4) cards (or PCMCIA form-factor ones, via an adapter).
• wd(4) on-board microdrive.
• ohci(4) USB controller supporting most usb(4) devices, or acting as a cdcef(4) 'ethernet' slave.
• pxammc(4) MMC/SD/SDIO controller.
• apm(4) power management and suspend.
• zaudio(4) audio.

Devices that can be connected:

• zrc(4) remote control.
• Most USB devices, see usb(4) for a list.
• Most PCMCIA devices (in a CF formfactor, or via a CF-PCMCIA adapter), see pcmcia(4).

Getting and installing

The latest supported OpenBSD/zaurus release is OpenBSD 5.4. Here are the OpenBSD/zaurus 5.4 installation instructions .

Snapshots are made available from time to time, in this location as well as in a few mirrors. Here are the OpenBSD/zaurus snapshot installation instructions as well.