Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 Instruction Manual page 207

my Zaurus SL-C3000 and SL-C3100
There currently are two ipk file formats. One uses the tar and gz format, wheras the other one uses
a different binary format that is the same as the Debian .deb format. The Zaurus with default Sharp
ROM (and Cacko) as well as pdaXrom uses the tar and gz format, which basically is a gzipped
tarball (.tgz or .tar.gz) with a control structure and renamed to .ipk. If you extract this ipk file, you
will find 3 files inside it - a text file called debian-binaries which just contains the string 2.0, and
two .tar.gz files called control and data. The control.tar.gz file contains a text file called control
which has informaton about the package such as the Maintainer's name, dependencies, version,
description, etc. There may also be some optional shell scripts for doing some pre and post
configuration tasks during install and uninstall. Finally, the file data.tar.gz contains all the files and
directory structure of the files for their destination location. The other ipk format is used by
OpenZaurus and PocketWorkstation (Debian) and requires the ar command to extract the files.
To unpack an ipk file to see what is inside it, do the following:
# unpackipk somefile.ipk
To create your own ipk file, do the following to create the ipk file structure:
# newipk myproject
Then once you add your files in the correct locations and also update the control file with the
information about your application, you can create your ipk file with the following command:
# makeipk myproject
If you want to convert a .deb or OZ ipk file so you can unpack it with unpackipk, then convert it
using the deb2ipk perl script first, or ue the ar tool instead.
Building your own pdaXii13 image
You can also build your own customised pdaXii13 image.
The simplest way is to just backup your customised pdaXii13 system with zbackup and rename the
backup tgz file to hdimage-custom.tgz and use it to flash your Zaurus with (in combination with the
other install files).
The harder way is to rip the default initrd file for the C1000/C3100 and customise that image.
The following describes how the pdaXii13 binaries are built if you want to build it yourself from
scratch:
updater.sh
Grab an updater.sh file (I used the one from pdaXrom C3000 beta2) and use the endecsh utility to
decode it into a normal shell script and customise the script.
# endecsh -d updater.sh updater.txt
Then use endecsh to encode the updater.sh script.
# endecsh -e updater.txt updater.sh
You can compile endecsh yourself or extract it from the updater-tools.bin file.
updater-tools.bin
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http://www.users.on.net/~hluc/myzaurus/
16/09/2007 12:23