Sharp zaurus programs

There has been some confusion as to whether the Zaurus has USB 2. File transfers occur at a rather leisurely pace. It also has USB host functionality. This allows you to use a variety of USB peripherals with the Zaurus, just as if it were a normal computer. The only catch is that you have to find a USB adapter with a mini-A connector.

The cables that you often get with PDAs and digital cameras look similar, but have mini-B connectors, which will not put the Zaurus into USB host mode. Mini-A USB adapters. Zaurus with USB keyboard and mouse. Once you get the cable, though, you can use a surprising number of peripherals. USB mice can be used with the installation of a small piece of freely available software and work surprisingly well, although the cursor leaves "trails" behind it where the screen takes a second or two to refresh.

However, most of these things require that you type some commands in the terminal. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and IR Many people were upset when the was announced with no internal networking options. However, when you consider that the device is intended for Japan, where most people will probably be using compact-flash-sized cellular modems for mobile Internet access, the omission of internal Wi-Fi or Bluetooth makes a little more sense.

Also remember that the internal microdrive makes it less likely that you would need to have a memory card in the CF slot, freeing it up for a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth card. Wi-Fi is officially supported by Sharp, so most Still, it would be a good idea to do some research online to make sure that the card you are considering has been used successfully by someone else.

It works well, with no additional drivers required. It does stick out more than an inch from the CF card slot, though, making holding the Zaurus and typing more difficult. With Wi-Fi Card Inserted. Zaurus with Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse. Bluetooth is a different story. Sharp does not officially support the use of Bluetooth cards on the Zaurus.

There is a software package called Bluez that allows you to use Bluetooth, but it requires mostly manual configuration. This entails going in and editing configuration files with a text editor and running commands in the terminal. Also, the number of supported cards is limited, and it can be surprisingly hard to find ones that work. I am using a Socket Bluetooth card.

It works well now, but at first putting the Zaurus to sleep would disable the card. It took me a while to stumble onto the right configuration commands to fix the problem. I was also able to use a USB Bluetooth dongle with no problems. I am currently able to use Bluetooth to access the Internet via my RAZR mobile phone, and I have my PowerBook set to share my Internet connection to Bluetooth, allowing me to surf the Internet and access files on my home network at a speed that is very comparible to the Wi-Fi card.

Then I have to manually reconnect to them. The mouse is only useful insofar as it frees you from having to stop and pick up the stylus to select something on screen. Keyboard shortcuts can pretty much do the same thing. I can also be used to exchange some types of data. I was able to send all of my address book contacts from my Palm to the Zaurus in one shot, and you can also send Calendar and ToDo information, but only one item at a time.

Some of them like the Cacko ROM are essentially improvements on the standard Sharp ROM, while others like pdaXrom are completely different and create an OS very similar to the one you would have on a desktop Linux machine.

Also, since I am using the device in Japanese, some of my screenshots will have Japanese in them. But this will be converted to English if you buy a converted Zaurus or convert it on your own. Also displayed on the taskbar are a clock, battery and volume indicators, and icons showing if cards are inserted in the memory card slots. Other applets with a variety of uses can be also added. The programs that are running are displayed as icons toward the center of the taskbar, in a manner similar to the dock on Mac OS X.

Application Launcher. The launcher is functional, but pretty barebones. You can divide your programs into categories, which are displayed via tabs at the top of the screen. Icons can be displayed in one of two sizes slightly too big or way too small. The only changes you can make from within the launcher itself involve tapping and holding an application icon and changing some of its launch settings. File Manager. Explorer QT. The tab on the far right is the file manager.

You can use it to copy, move, rename and delete files on the internal microdrive, or on any inserted memory cards. If you want something a little more powerful and flexible, I would suggest one of the add-on file managers like Tree! Explorer QT pictured above. Qtopia seems pretty different than most desktop versions of Linux, though.

No way, that is, except for going into the terminal and manually killing the process. Most of the "bonus" software that was added to the to help distinguish it from the previous model is of little use to non-Japanese speakers. But first a word about third-party software. And in some cases just installing the programs is a very complicated process involving tracking down half a dozen library packages from various web sites, manually editing configuration files, etc.

Compared to the Palm or the Pocket PC, software for the Zaurus is seriously lacking in user friendliness and variety. Admittedly, this is largely because Sharp pulled out of the US market. And it is true that most of what is available is free and open-source — the only piece of commercial software I mention in this review is TextMaker. It is nice to be able to see the contents of appointments on the monthly calendar view, though thanks to the VGA resolution.

It is apparently possible to sync the Zaurus with Outlook on Windows, but since it comes with Japanese versions of the software, that can take some work to figure out too. Address Book. Web Browsers The Zaurus comes with the NetFront browser preinstalled, and there are also several other browsers available. I use Opera most of the time, but occasionally switch to NetFront for a few pages. Email The included email program, QtMail, is actually quite capable, although it does have a few issues.

Mac email accounts. Unfortunately, it always wants to sync all of the folders for each account when it checks for new mail, which makes it take longer than it should. It does allow for the creation of filters, and for sending and receiving attachments. You can set a certain size over which messages will not automatically be downloaded only the headers will be downloaded. However, there is no way to have it just download the body of a message and not the attachments — the size you set applies to both the message body and attachments together.

I have it set to around 35k, which is enough to allow most text messages to be downloaded, but screens out most attachements. Overall, it is a decent program, but its speed and lack of customizability do leave something to be desired. Terminal What would a Linux machine be without a terminal? There are also third-party terminals that you can download that support things like multiple windows.

No tables, spell checker, or other advanced features. If you want to change settings, close the connection and use the menu in the lower-right corner of the screen. You can't change settings during a session. While clicking can be accomplished with a 'tap', and dragging seems to work as expected, you might find that double-clicking is difficult to perform on the Zaurus screen.

Some operating systems will accept an Enter key to activate an icon. Try using either the keyboard's Enter, or the OK button on your Zaurus. If you will be spending a lot of time in the terminal, or it what you want to display doesnt fit well on the Zaurus' screen, you might consider running an SSH daemon on your Zaurus to allow you to connect to from your deskto machine's full-size screen. You will need the following skills in order to install successfully: ability to follow directions carefully, basic knowledge of linux command line, a way to get a file onto your Zaurus desktop sync, FTP, etc , the ability to download and install an ssh client for your desktop machine.

Typical task on the internal screen showing hard to read line wrappings. Same tasks being performed, on the same Zaurus, thru a remote screen.

By default, the login name is 'root' with no password. If you followed directions in step 5, above, you assigned a password to your root account. This same password will now be necessary to access your Zaurus' filesystem with an FTP client.

There's nothing you have to install, its already there. Some notes:. Handwriting a letter at a time is cute, but you may find yourself wanting more precise control over the characters you enter into your Zaurus. Several add-on input methods are available to assist with particular kinds of entry. Some are designed for specific programs, some are more general purpose. Keyboard: Comes standard with the Zaurus.

Uses the US standard qwerty layout to maintain familiarity. The keys are small, but usable. The layout requires a bit of re-learning, but the accessibility gained by having more keys available, and in a logical order FITALY , makes it a winner. Custom Keyboard: This add-on by Jesper Pedersen allows you to quickly access your most frequently used special characters including Unicode with a single tap on the character in a new input bar at the bottom of your screen.

You can also create shortcuts that when typed onto the physical keyboard are expanded into their full-text equivalents. While its most useful inside the QPlot program, there may be other times when the shortcuts come in handy. You have already downloaded Tab Manager above , right?

Launch the application and you are presented with a hierarchical menu explorer-style of your existing Zaurus tabs. Tap any tab to expand it, and see the programs that are residing there. To move a program to a different tab, tap once on the program name, then tap on the tab name where you want it moved. To create a new tab, tap the 'Folder' icon, name the tab and provide an icon for it. The tabs are displayed in Tab Manager, and on the Zaurus browser in alphabetical order.

To create a new program entry, click the 'Document' icon. An entry named 'New App' appears in the currently selected tab. Select it and tap the 'Pencil' icon to edit its attributes. You can also use the pencil to edit tab attributes. After icons are loaded, you can provide a Name, Executable path and Comment for the entry. When you close Tab Manager, the Qtopia environment must refresh, which takes a few seconds, before your changes will appear.

This can be done with a bit of hacking but should ideally be the default for the clamshell models so you get the best mix of applications from both Qtopia and X11 environments since they have plenty of space for it. However, OZ appears to be very developer centric. It is coupled with a build system, OpenEmbedded, and very much focused on building, packaging and source control.

It is a system build from the ground up and focuses a lot on the kernel and clean builds. The OZ team appears to be very organised and have a very structural approach. Unfortunately, this sometimes comes across as being inflexible and stubborn by some end users. It also sometimes appear that usability is given less importance in favour of portability. The gap for this is filled with the Hentges distro, which is a more user-friendly distro based on OZ.

Both are a more user-friendly repackaging of a more rudimentary distro. Hentges is currently available for Akita C and Spitz C3x The latest version of OpenZaurus for the C3x00 is 3. This is something very hard to avoid for software projects unless you take Sharp's approach of not updating the environment and just patching it up when forced to.

OZ takes the opposite approach. It is constantly being build and it integrates a lot of features from other Linux distros such as altboot and kexec. OZ also takes advantage of the MicroDrive available on the C3x00 and thus installs itself to the MicroDrive instead of the flash.

This of course has its advantages and disadvantages. On the C this would be a great advantage, however, the same is also done for the C and C which may or may not be as advantageous. The C and C are more or less treated like a C on OZ since they are almost identical as opposed to what other distros do, which treat the C like a C with an extra harddisk. OpenZaurus also boasts to have around packages and that their package dependencies all work.

However, this is not entirely true. They naturally forgot to mention how many of those packages actually work. Unfortunately, a large percentage of those packages don't actually work or are just mostly useless cannon fodder. Their large number also is a result that they split up every component into a separate package. So while some distros convenniently have one single package for an application, OZ would split it up into several dozen packages. Thus they need to heavily rely on their package dependency to pull all these packages together.

Needless to say that not all their packages are up to date and not all dependencies resolve properly. Some packages have not been updated for quite some time. I believe that OZ has a lot of potential to be the best distro eventually. See my custom OZ page to see a list of customisations that I have applied. However, in its current state, it can be summarised as fast but useless.

GPE is quite ugly but pretty fast as well. However, it is buggy and unstable too. In theory, OZ can do everything perfectly, however, in practice, it is quite a long way from that goal. One thing the OZ team needs to do to woe more Zaurus users is to provide at least the same feature rich applications and functionality as the other distros already have. They should expand their repository to include more useful applications and actually test their packages before they put them on their feeds.

They also need to get off their high horse and not just say that OZ is the best and everything else is crap.

There are a lot of great functionality the other distros have that the OZ people could learn from and adopt to make it better. It is quite ironic that a distro that so heavily depends on package dependencies does not have a working GUI Package Manager.

However, I like these hacks ie keyhelper because they are actually very useful and make the Zaurus a pleasure to use.

Angstrom is the successor and replacement for OpenZaurus once it is stable and fully working. At the moment, it has the same problems plaguing OpenZaurus if not more. The kernel has been updated to the latest 2. From a Zaurus point of view the main difference between OpenZaurus and Angstrom is that Angstrom is build around the arm EABI which means applications should run faster in general if they are able to run without crashing.

The move to Angstrom also provides a newer GCC 4. From a developer point of view, this means they can work with the absolute latest libraries and frameworks such as QT4 and OpenMoko. From a user point of view this means an unstable system which keeps changing and although there are many packages, hardly any testing has been done on them.

Angstrom aims to be a generic platform for portable devices not necessarily Zaurus. This means, the priority of Angstrom is to be able to be installed on as many devices as possible. The consequence of that is that it needs to be generic and not too machine specific. However, to be really user friendly, a distro needs to be customised for the target platform and take advantage of any of its features whether they be generic or unique to a device.

Many performance optimizations as well as usability features are often very machine specific. Debian is another future possibility for the Zaurus once it has become stable. Hopefully and equally as stable kernel can be build for it as well.

In the meantime, there has been quite a bit of work on enabling the arm based Debian to be installed on the Zaurus similar to PocketWorkstation but without reliance on an already existing distribution. Titchy is such a distro based on Debian arm and a 2. It also has its own installer which installs an initial rootfs onto the MicroDrive before connecting to a Debian feed to install the rest of the system.

Not sure whether I am going to try it though. Learning Linux is already keeping me quite busy. There are basically several choices to be made. First one is to whether use the older but stable 2. I chose the 2. The 2. The next major choice is whether to run Qtopia or X For the 2. When choosing between Qtopia and X11, the look and feel as well as what applications are available is of importance.

For Qtopia applications, Cacko and Sharp ROM have more applications since they are backward compatible with older apps and they run commercial applications. On the X11 front, there appears to be more useful applications and games available for pdaXrom and it looks much prettier than GPE as well.

OPIE is not a real choice since it lacks essential applications even though it looks nicer. For the SL-C, the choice is a bit different since there aren't many distros that really support it.

There are also alternate boot loaders for the Zaurus other than the default one provided by Sharp. With the introduction of the 2. OZ has simplified the pivot boot process with altboot and once kexec is integrated, it could be used to boot other distros as well. Using one of these bootloaders might be a way to boot and pivot the rootfs on the C to overcome the tiny 16M flash problem. However, the SL-C is a bit different since it got a tiny flash. The choice for a distro for my SL-C is quite hard since none of the currently available distros are quite ready yet.

However, neither of the two has gotten to a point yet where it is stable enough to use and includes sufficient useful applications and utilities. Both still have a lot of shortcomings. Below is a discussion about why these two distros have potential and also where they fall short. Firstly, the OS needs to be able to boot and mount the internal MicroDrive as rootfs. OZ does that very well, however, pdaXrom does not officially support the C so it needs to be hacked to do that. Also, the perfect distro needs to fully support the SL-C hardware and its many powerful features.

The SL-C has great hardware which more or less is supported by both distros. Here is a quick summary of hardware and their level of support:. The main keys on the keyboard is mapped correctly on both distros, but is not very well documented on how to customise the keymaps. Some special keys are missing on both distros. Sticky keys can be enabled on pdaXrom which does not seem to be the case in OZ.

Multi-key does not seem to work on OZ. OZ uses the matchbox window manager which looks quite ugly.