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« on: December 21, 2004, 11:08:10 am »
Well, I'll chip in here. The 6000 was my first foray away from the trusty Psions which I've used for years. This is the first machine I've felt confident could do what I wanted - everything the Psion could do but updated to colour [sic - I'm in the UK!] screen and WiFi. Having worked on Unix since Version 7 on PDP-11, I really wanted to bring Linux to my palmtop. As a result, Sharp-Qtopia clearly was not for me and OZ-GPE was [short of doing it myself]. Having run OZ-GPE for about a week now, my comments are;
The installation docs are very sparse, I flashed from the SD and had a few failures until I realised I was missing a file. The README in the OZ directory doesn't mention that you need zImage.bin!!
As mentioned elsewhere, the GPE/OE splash screen gives the appearance of having hung. I reset a few times before I got to the calibration screen. Either a message to this effect or fixing this problem would be wise. It's a worrying time as you start to think you've bricked your new toy.
Being a unix dude through and through, the first thing I did is fire up the terminal. Shame it's only rxvt and that the default shell has no command line recall - hard to bootstrap yourself with so few facilities - but I pressed on. It was a voyage of discovery finding out where the keys where. I still haven't found CTRL-C! A README or motd could go a long way to addressing this.
Both my 1Gb CF and 1Gb SD were recognised no problem which helps installing apps when you've got no networking. I think a gzip of some optional apps would be nice - a bit like
usbnet was a breeze to get going [well done], which gave me access from the desktop. It also let me install bash and sshd which went in flawlessly.
WiFi was pretty tough to get going. I had to understand the whole wlan-ng thing which is not nice. I think this needs some work for general release. If you only have the Z's keyboard plus rxvt, poking around to get WiFi going will lose most people. I should mention that the network config gui doesn't seem to work.
It should be possible to ship with a couple of optional configs.
I think the run control scripts need a bit of work. Runlevel 2 is a weird one to chose - it's a multi-user machine with X running - sounds like 5 to me. Why is bluetooth started by default not WiFi?
I have major suspend/resume problems and, generally, support for the hardware buttons is non-existent which is a shame. I am planning to do VOIP, streaming media, and bespoke app dev when I've put together the toolchain. On this last point, a published 6000 toolchain would get more people bug fixing/porting. For example, I'd like to get a later gcc going (3.4 anyone) and a new kernel (2.6)
I can't comment on OPIE as I haven't installed - my experience with the Sharp ROM put me off ever going near it.
Generally, I should think anyone prepared to flash a new machine with stuff off the net is prepared to do a bit of work, but I think it's still too hard. There's some docs to write and a few bugs to iron out but it's looking great - keep it up.
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