Zaurus Rom Zoo, But Where's A Vision?, A short discourse on a newbie's perception of Z community Options

[Snappy]

....
As my boss likes to tell me, if you see a problem, own the problem.

Hi Antikx ... nice quote there ...

Walkman, I hear you there. It took me awhile to figure out the distros, and I'm a developer! ... that said, there had been attempts over the years to sort things out. If we consider how the Familiar project evolved and how OE more or less get replaced by Angstrom, the general course is there.

Perhaps one difficulty (and yet strength at the same time), is that it is open source. Developers come and go, so ok, on second thought, I think it is because SHARP for some reason, refused to properly market the Zaurii to US or to the consumer. Instead they think that the money is in the corporate world. If Jobs thought of marketing the iPod or Apple Computer to the corp world, I think Apple will be going no where. Unfortunately, Jobs is not the boss in SHARP, and so the user pool is lesser than that of vintage volkswagen ... I think!

Anyway, from what I see, many developers are busy trying to fix stability issues whenever they 'upgrade' to a new kernel. It's not funny anymore when after a few years, several revisions and you read "We are working on the touchscreen/SDcard/network support" for new releases. It makes me wonder why such a supposedly modular operating system breaks so easily from version to version. But since I also don't have the time to commit to solving it, I've taken the easy way out by keeping quiet and using Cacko with pdaQtrom installed while trying out other ROMs occassionally.

I have the Kohjinsha and with its 'miserable' 3+ hour batt life, I'm mixed between using it and my Z. I hope to squeeze out another 1~2 years out of my Z and after that, I would say that it has fulfilled its value for what I got it for.

Honestly, with all the goodness of opensource, a part of me secretly wish that I can just pay someone $100~$200 for a full functioning OS with all the feature set that I ask for. Kinda makes me believe that MS got this big and rich because they manage to fulfill the needs of 80% of users 80% of the time, so they manage to monopolize the PC market if you will. As it is, many of the distros for Zs fulfill 80% ~ 95% of some users needs, but its a niche 20% perhaps. The remaining 80% probably only get 40% ~ 60% satisfaction 50% of the time, so many jump ship after trying it out. Ok, I'm so generalising and tapping on unscientific (gut feel and sky numbers) means to arrive at these numbers, but you get the drift!

Then we have the problem of the small size of Z users and actual Zs available out in the market. Ah well, nothing like a rant once in awhile ...

[koen]

how OE more or less get replaced by Angstrom

Angstrom isn't replacing OE. OE is a buildsystem. Angstrom is a distribution. Angstrom packages are built using OE.

[Snappy]

how OE more or less get replaced by Angstrom

Angstrom isn't replacing OE. OE is a buildsystem. Angstrom is a distribution. Angstrom packages are built using OE.

Ah ... I stand corrected.