Form Factor - Handheld Pc, Or Zaurus-style? Options

[chiark]

Wow, this has really captured my imagination !

For me, the zaurus is too small for comfortable use, both in terms of screen and in terms of the keyboard.

Perhaps I'm too old, but for me the sweet spot of form factor usability vs portability is in the shape of the Psion Series 5, and the Sigmarion 3.

The psion's keyboard is great, the screen is adequate if a weird shape...

The sig3 runs an 800x480 screen with a very, very capable keyboard. If it ran Linux, well, it'd be *awesome*.

I'd love the screen real estate and keyboard size of the old devices with modern hardware. Am I alone in thinking that that is about the right form factor for such a device? We're not going for PDA replacement after all, but general purpose pervasive computing platform

[Da_Blitz]

that support online faliure but not both devices running at the same time, if anything its underkill

it depends on what you need to sync as well, if its contacts and apointments and a few files then opensync will suffice. it can also resolve diffrences on both devices with and without human interaction (like activesync but it actually works and is stable as well as os independent)

its a more specilised version of rsync in many ways.

but what do we need to sync. i am assuming that it would be the users home dir. basically thier settings, notes and mail dirs.

mail can be handeled by setting up a mail server on one and telling all devices to talk to that one machine but this is inflexible and requires you to carry that machine at all times (alright if its you watch ) another way is imap and its support for the server to be the authoritve source. this seems ot work well but requires a server with imap accounts (not a problem see soulotieon latter) another way is opensync with the mail dir forders. there is the posibility of 2 mail messages on 2 devices bieng named the same thing however

needs thought is all, i am leaning towards the imap aproch. esecially if we can do the push mail thing as well (its a feature to help sell it )

now for a question about how you handel media files, me personally i create a user called music, moives and anime and let home folders be set up for them. that way it makes sharing with samba easy as you set the perms to 777 and the ownership to the catagorey (ie music). then allow a samba login of music or mhatever or better yet anon guest accounts where guest is mapped to the dir owner (music) this means a comprimise can only accses the shares files if samba changes to the guest UID like i think it does

the reason i mention it is if you have more than one pearson on the machine its easy to share music with eachother, it helps simplyfiy networked filesystems and makes backups alot easier. in our case these are all pluses for this device. when a new user is created i have a symlink pointing from thier /home dir to ../music or ../moives so that they automatically start using it.

thats my take on it. as i said it makes sharing ona network easier as i was thikning about a networked fs with disconnected support and union fs to combined all the barnches. the idea was to use nfs but it cant really support bieng disconnected, samba is better ubt i think andrewfs is probelly the best at this point in time but not by much. this is becauseit effectivly combinds unionfs into itself and merges all visible servers

i really need to look at andrewfs some more. one of the intresting things i have heard bieng done with it is using it to refer to docs on a local machine. ie if you /home is on andrew fs (via a symlink so /home/user is a symlink to /andrew/www.userdomain.com/home/user) then any any files you produce that refer to a local internat source will work regardless of the computer you are on. in somthing like what i hope to achive this feature is highly sort after

end bable