On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 07:20:57AM -0500, Price Technology wrote: > On Thursday 10 July 2003 22:41, Colburn wrote: > > The Sharp Zaurus series, recently supplemented by model 5600, and a > > couple of other models that are being indirectly imported to the US with > > some neat features. They are shipped with Linux as the OS. > > > Therefore one would assume they will interface with Linux as well. Any > personal experience (ie do you got one) ?? I have a Sharp Zaurus 5500. 64MB RAM, 256MB SD card in it, a Netgear WiFi card, and a 512MB Compact Flash card. Currently I'm running OpenZaurus (www.openzaurus.org) on it with the 64M kernel. (The Sharp ROM allocates 32MB to a ramdisk; with OpenZaurus, one can choose various ramdisk sizes, or none at all.) I use very few PIM features, but I can read and send e-mail on it, do a little web browsing (in Konqueror), and read source code at my leisure. (Editing code is a bit more difficult!) The killer feature for me is that with the WiFi or the serial cable for my cell phone, I can log into work from anywhere via ssh and do maintenance whenever I get paged. That means that I can leave the laptop at home on weekends and jsut take the cell-phone and Zaurus to the beach. :-) The 5600 has 64MB flash built-in, so the SD card is unnecessary (which is nice, because the driver is closed source and has held back the kernel upgrade for many months), but the 5600 only comes with 32MB of RAM (last I checked). Using the Sharp ROM, that's probably a net win, but I see it as a net loss when using OpenZaurus, since the additional 32MB of RAM really helps run a full-featured environment. IntelliSync? We don't need no stinkin' IntelliSync. In addition to rsync, the Zaurus can run NFS server, Samba, and the boa web server, so there is no need to copy data back and forth. Watch the look on a Windows user's face as he downloads media files from your Zaurus web server. ;-p Regards, Bill Rugolsky
