Messages

1

General Discussion / Olympus Produce Linux/wince Pda - R1000

« on: February 02, 2005, 12:30:07 pm »

At this point, unless Trolltech manages to get some heavyweight phone manufacturers on board, I think that Sharp has effectivley killed the Linux PDA market outside of Asia,
Regards,
Clive
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Wait and see...
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Sounds promising. Can you divulge a little more ?? Or at least a ballpark date?

2

General Discussion / Olympus Produce Linux/wince Pda - R1000

« on: February 01, 2005, 12:48:44 pm »

... however I tend to think that whomever wrote the press release probably got confused.

Well, then the art department did too because the picture clearly shows WinCE without the PocketPC shell
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Thanks, your eyes are obviously better than mine. I hadn't really studied the pictures closely.
The spec sheet posted by Streamline also confirms the Wince 4.2. Ah well, another device dead in the water before it is actually released. I can only conclude that they are aiming it at the rugeddised industrial market, competing with Symbol, Psion-Teklogic, etc.
It doesn't seem to offer any compelling reason for the average PDA user or hacker to get one. For Linux hackers, we are far better served by the Zaurus devices, and for those that want the other OS, the Dell Axims or HP Ipaqs seem to have the market pretty much tied up (and have a host of 3rd party apps that the Olympus won't run).
At this point, unless Trolltech manages to get some heavyweight phone manufacturers on board, I think that Sharp has effectivley killed the Linux PDA market outside of Asia,
Regards,
Clive

3

General Discussion / Olympus Produce Linux/wince Pda - R1000

« on: January 31, 2005, 04:47:56 pm »

Except that CE.NET is missing a number of "Pocket PC" shell APIs upon which many Pocket PC apps rely. Olympus decision to go with a version of CE that won't support many of the most popular Pocket PC apps pushes this PDA even further out of the consumer market. I don't care how many $$$ Olympus throws into marketing, as soon as people realize that they can't run their favorite PPC apps, it's dead in the water (at least in the US).
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You are correct, CE.NET ( or WinCE 4.2) , does leave out many of the shell APIs, however I tend to think that whomever wrote the press release probably got confused. The press release mentions Windows CE .NET 4.2, which is the underlying OS of Pocket PC 2003, which is what they are probably going to use, I guess.
If not then I should imagine that Olympus has hijacked Sharp's Zaurus marketing team lock, stock, and barrel, which can only bode well for the Zaurus line  
Regards,
Clive

4

General Discussion / Olympus Produce Linux/wince Pda - R1000

« on: January 31, 2005, 02:42:42 pm »

I'd like to buy it.  I think I'd rather have Win CE .Net than Windows Mobile Pocket PC. 
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Microsoft believes in marketing through obfuscation: Microsoft took Windows CE V3.0, customised it, and supplied the customised version to pda manufacturers as the "Pocket PC" platform, and later as the "Pocket PC 2002" platform.
Then M$ released Windows CE V4.0, however for some misguided marketing reason, they also decided to call Windows CE version V4.0 and newer CE.NET. Windows CE V4.2 (now also know as CE.NET), is the basis for "Pocket PC 2003".
So whether you buy a device based on Windows Mobile Pocket PC, or Win CE.NET, you are essentially still getting the same crappy operating system.
Confused? I think either that that is what Microsoft intended, or their marketing department has been taken over by refugees from some govenment bureaucracy.
Regards,
Clive

5

General Discussion / Olympus Produce Linux/wince Pda - R1000

« on: January 31, 2005, 12:47:53 pm »

The verdict on such a product has already been reached with the Sharp Zaurus, Why Olympus wants to reapeat this experiment is really a puzzle.
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Maybe because Olympus has a real marketing department, who actually intend marketing the device and maybe even listen to their customers.
Also, if you look at what is currently available to the majority of PDA users, most of whom have never heard of Zaurus, 320x240 with no keyboard is the norm. Only a few of the really top end Pocket PC devices have recently come out with 640x480. I recently skimmed a copy of "Pocket PC" magazine at the newstand, there was plenty of discussion about some of the "innovations" in the latest Pocket PC devices, yet none of them have yet caught up to the Zaurus.
Regards,
Clive

6

General Discussion / Palmsource To Port Palm Os On Top Of Linux

« on: December 08, 2004, 04:41:04 pm »

Interesting.....Will we see this on the Z?

PalmSource to Port Palm OS on top of Linux

This is interesting.
About year back, I was looking into licensing the Palm OS with a view to embedding it into the Zaurus. That way, the Z would retain all it's Linux functionality, and also be able to run Palm apps "natively" (i.e not using a separate emulator). Unfortunately my potential investors were scared off by the Zaurus's shrinking market share and Sharps indifferent attitude to North American and European markets.
It is a pity that I didn't manage to pull this off, I thought that the combination of, at the time, the world's best PDA hardware with the world's most popular PDA OS, combined with the full power of Linux, would be a killer.
Regards,
Clive

7

Software / Which is the best password keeper of Cxx0?

« on: December 01, 2004, 10:45:30 pm »

the best password manager is PWM/PI with the KDEPIM Package
Here : http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/kdepimp...pk.zip?download

You say it is the best, but without stating why. I would be curious to know why, and to what of the other Zaurus password managers you have compared it?
Thanks,
Clive

8

Off Topic forum / Linux Decisions + Linux Operating System on Laptop

« on: November 15, 2004, 05:15:08 pm »

I'll add a vote for Suse, I have 8.2 on one laptop, and 9.1 on another. Both installations went absolutely smoothly, with all my hardware identified and the networking setup automatically. Perhaps the biggest installation hassle was trying to decide what to install. Suse like most distributions comes with thousands of packages. I particularly like the automatic package upgrade, whereby Suse calls home when you tell it, grabs a list of updated packages, and offers to install them for you.
You can download a Live CD version of Suse 9.2 at http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/ this will allow you try it out, and see if your hardware is compatible. Unfortunately if you like it you will have to purchase Suse. This is not as bad as it sounds, as the manuals that come with it are more than worth the price.
You mention that you have a partition manager, you may want to resize the Windows and DOS partitions before installing whatever Linux distribution that you choose.
Regards,
Clive

9

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Legacy apps on OZ

« on: November 12, 2004, 02:26:51 pm »

Hi Zenyatta and Lardman,
Thanks for the help and advice, it looks like I will have to go the way that you suggest.
I was not keen to go that route, as I already have a fairly comprehensive "scons" file this will build the Zaurus version, a Pocket PC version, and a desktop version. Including creating the different help files, packaging all the graphics etc.
I was hoping that I could install the correct OE libraries, headers and updated compiler, and just modify the "scons" file to point to these when building for OZ.

SCons, is a build tool for replacing make, it is written in Python and I can highly recommend it. I doubt that I will ever need to use make again.
Regards,
Clive

10

Qt/Qtopia / Appropriate resizing of QT dialogs and such

« on: November 11, 2004, 03:16:59 pm »

Hi,
I don't use Designer, instead I  position all the controls manually in the Dialog constructor. The postion and size of the controls is calculated according to the screen resolution. This is painful, but seems to provide the best way of ensuring that everything fits just how I like.
I am not a great fan of layouts, in my experience, they seem to often do an adequate but not very good job of creating a nice looking screen.
Regards,
Clive

11

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Legacy apps on OZ

« on: November 10, 2004, 01:09:55 pm »

Hi Si,
Thanks for the link to the wiki.

But if it's commercial, I don't know how you're going to get the source....

Thanks, I have the source. Looking at the openembedded and openzuarus web sites, it is not obvious as to how one recompiles a Qt based app for OZ.  However it seems a lot more complex than just installing a few new libraries to link with and then recompiling.

I would prefer to have the application run on OZ without a recompile. Is OZ moving away from supporting Qt based apps completely? Or is there some sort of support for running them.  I thought that was what  opie-compat did.

Thanks,
Clive

12

Angstrom & OpenZaurus / Legacy apps on OZ

« on: November 09, 2004, 02:19:34 pm »

Hi,
Where could I find out what is required to run a commercial app on OZ?
I am trying to run SafeDee on OZ, and although opie-compat, has been installed, I am still having problems with the Qt libraries.
i.e
"error while loading shared libraries: libqpe.so.1"

Alternatively, where could I find documentation on recompiling for the OZ environment, I have looked at www.openzaurus.org, but couldn't find anything.

Any help, advice, or links to other resources would be appreciated.

Regards,
Clive

13

Sharp ROMs / Trolltech Qtopia 2.1 ROM soon

« on: November 08, 2004, 12:31:52 pm »

What you'll get is a stable product that syncs with Windows, Linux and Mac OS.

Hi,
Will there be any way for developers to add support for synching 3rd party apps? i.e. something similar to Palm conduits.
Thanks,
Clive

14

General Discussion / Sharp pulls the Zaurus

« on: October 18, 2004, 04:37:14 pm »

From inFoSync

Facing stuff competition and low sales, a Sharp representative has informed infoSync World that the company has decided to fully withdraw its Zaurus SL line of Linux-based handhelds from the US market and focus on its home market in Japan. The company will be selling through remaining SL-6000 handhelds already produced and will continue to offer support and service for existing products, but will not be producing or selling additional units or models in the United States. The Zaurus line will continue to be sold in Japan, where different models have been available and have sold much better than in other markets.

It seems like the end of the line for official Zaurus imports.
I did however, find the following quote fairly amusing, "and will continue to offer support and service for existing products", it is not like they ever provided support and service in the first place.
Regards,
Clive

15

C1000/3x00 General discussions / NEW clamshell model shipping NOV 10

« on: October 15, 2004, 02:13:52 pm »

on the plus side it looks like it will still use QT/Linux and not Wince  Though I would have preferred 128MB RAM

Actually although I am no fan of Wince, I think Sharp would have been wise to have released Wince as an option. Sharp has had killer hardware, although I am disappointed that they didn't include WiFi & a faster processor, but their marketing of a Linux based handheld anywhere outside of Japan has been a total disaster.
If they had of looked at supporting the Pocket PC OS (the current name for Wince), they probably would be assured of a much larger market, which would then ensure that the Zaurus and 3rd party accessories would be easily available to us Linux users, and with a larger market, they may even be able to drop the price.
Unfortunately like it or not, Wince is really making large inroads in the PDA market steadily gaining on Palm. The one thing you can't fault MS on is perseverance and marketing. They took a crappy OS, modified and modified it, marketed the hell out of it. They still have a crappy OS, however with an enormous market share.

Perhaps the real solution would be for Sharp to upgrade the Pim apps, and to steal some of the MS marketing people  
Regards,
Clive