Zaurus Never Die, Leaving the Netwalker Options

[Jiba]

After 3 months on the Netwalker, I'm giving it up and I'm returning to the old Zaurus.

The two major reasons are that the Netwalker has a very bad keyboard (compared to the very good Zaurus one), and that the Netwalker standy autonomy is pretty ridiculous : about 5 days (and obviously less if you use the Netwalker !). By comparison, the Zaurus standby autonomy was more that a month.

Short standby autonomy can be considered as "normal" for cell phone, since the phone must power its antenna even when being in standby. But for a mobile computer ? Even my 4-year-old basic cell phone still has more than 10 days of standby autonomy !

In addition, the Netwalker is bigger and heavier. Although it has no mobile parts, it is noisy and emits a little "bzzz", even in standby. It has an inaccurate touchscreen, with unreliable double clicks. It uses specific power connector, and thus I was unable to connect it to my solar panel.

FInally, the software procided by Sharp are not optimized, in term of user interface, but also of optimization. All graphical operation (excepted video) are performed in software mode, since no driver are provided. Consequently, the Netwalker seems as slow as the Zaurus. For instance, the calendar program provided on the Netwalker (Mozilla Sunbird) is incredibly slow, MUCH slower than the Zaurus calendar.

Conclusion : the Netwalker is good for video and surfing (without typing), but the Zaurus is still better for everything else : taking notes, playing games, coding, agenda and addressbook... But I don't like video, and I not so dependent to Internet that I cannot wait until being at home for that. So the choice is easy !

Good luck for people that are still enduring the Netwalker.

[relei]

Hi,

this ist not an driver for the Netwalker but I belive the Ubuntu on the Netwalker do not use Neon-Engine.

I have found an better Driver on the Beagleboard site:

http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu#Xorg_omapfb_Drivers

but I have not test the driver jet.

Greetings,
Rene

[merlin1]

Hi,

this ist not an driver for the Netwalker but I belive the Ubuntu on the Netwalker do not use Neon-Engine.

I have found an better Driver on the Beagleboard site:

http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu#Xorg_omapfb_Drivers

but I have not test the driver jet.

Greetings,
Rene

This module doesn't work, just following the instructions for the BeagleBoard results in this:

CODE

$ cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old | grep fb
(II) LoadModule: "omapfb"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//omapfb_drv.so
(II) Module omapfb: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
(II) omapfb: Driver for OMAP framebuffer (omapfb) and external LCD controllers:
(WW) OMAPFBProbe: Not an omapfb device: DISP3 BG

However, Genesi's Efika MX Open Client also uses an i.MX515 CPU and possibly the same graphics chipset as the Netwalker. Not only are they successfully running Ubuntu 9.10 on it, they also claim to have a driver in the works which provides 2D acceleration:

http://blog.efikamx.info/2010/02/kernel-de...ent-status.html

If we can get this working on the Netwalker (or Sharp provides a working driver, perhaps using this as a base) this should put an end to the slow graphics performance we get thanks to fbdev.

The current source available from Genesi is an older release not containing the driver, and the modules are meant to be compiled against 2.6.31. Not sure how hard backporting to the Netwalker's kernel (2.6.28) would be, or whether it is possible to run 2.6.31 on it.

There's hope