What Is Wrong With Qtopia, Why Opie?

[antikristian]

Nice  Do you know if they plan on using a new image with qtopia or debian packages? Is it at all possible to do this, so that all you would have to do was to add a new feed and apt-get ?

mimeca: hentges' blog here

[antikristian]

even though one could for instance have an "install profile" for the amount of memory you had installed so you only got packages you needed, it would still be nice to have thousands of packages to chose from:)

I ran debian on my nslu2 266mhz 32mb ram disk server a few weeks back. Although I had plenty of hard drive space and ran ssh only (did plan for vnc or something with x, but did not get that far), it still is pretty close spec-wise to my zaurus. and it did run a debian system fine, with the option of installing tons of official debian packages on my will.

Maybe later on, when all handheld devices have plenty of storage and a screen equal or better to the 770 we might see such an initiative to make handheld linux as easy as desktop linux.    

[Hrw]

one think makes Debian not well suited to PDA enviroment: disk space usage and many dependencies.

Debian base system contain many packages, takes lot of space so it is hard to fit in 14, 30, 53 megabytes which Zaurus machines has for rootfs. Ofcourse you can resize Flash partitions to get more space, you can install software on SD or CF card but all of it takes lot of space - more then distros created directly for PDA devices.

Look at Emdebian - Debian for embedded devices (like pda etc) - they already found that big packages and lot of deps are not something which is good for target devices...

[antikristian]

How is the 770 doing this? is it a real debian system?

[koen]

How is the 770 doing this? is it a real debian system?
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The consumer image isn't, the developer image is. All this info is on maemo.org, btw

[Cresho]

I think at this point, Waiting for the new zaurus will decide where this thread is going to head towards.

how about 256mb internal memory?  512?

[Meanie]

two things,

the version of qtopia that ships with the Zaurus is archaic, ie, its very old and doesn't support a lot of the newer qtopia features.

debian does already work on the Zaurus, ie PocketWorkstation. It does not run "natively" because nobody has taken the time to package it up as a flashable image yet. PocketWorkstation does not have its own kernel so it cannot be booted directly right now. Also, since it uses glib 2.3.2, most of its packages can not be installed directly to most Zaurus distros because most of them still use glib 2.2.x. I believe OpenZaurus uses glib 2.3 as well, but I am not sure since I have not used OZ yet.

[adf]

HRW's reply contains most of the objections I expected from the dev community (people with lots of exterience putting linux on tiny devices).  I guess the best way to evaluate the issue would be t talk to people who run pocketworkstation from pdaxrom or gpe  (native xserver should make things about as fast as possible) things like the amount of storage debian consumes, and the large number of packages installed to fulfill dependencies,etc should be measureable.  performance is a bit subjective.. but maybe we could get some ideas for conversation? anyone want to run a chroot Pocketworkstation as their sole "Rom" (barring games and mplayer)for awhile for the sake of discussion?

Ironically, while I think Hrw probably has a point, in the respect of version control and hardware universality, OZ is in many ways a step in the direction the post describes.

I'd absloutely love ubuntu on my c3100 running xfce or a tweaked fvwm.  Of course, I love pdaxrom on my 3100 now

[koen]

Also note that desktop distros aren't designed to be installed in flash, so they will do a lot of writes and will wear out your flash pretty quickly. In OZ we have /var and /tmp in ram and symlink stuff /etc/resolv.conf to /var/ as well.