Wither Zaurus Development?

[rrnwexec]

I\'ve been away from the Zaurus world for a while. Is it just my perception or has third-party software development for the Zaurus decreased dramatically in the past 6 months?

What\'s going on? What did I miss?

[gene]

i dont know about the past 6 months but development does seem tk be rather slim.... very slim that is.

[amrein]

- Sharp has closed most of its web site (forum, dev support, doc.zaurus.com...).
- There\'s always the fight plus incompatibility issue between Sharp ROM, Calcko ROM, pdaX11ROM, OE/OZ, tkROM, Familiar on iPaq, LinuxPy on Yopy, Gentoo, Debian/PocketWorkstation... Hybrid ROM and so on.
- Most people are happy with this wide rom choice list and don\'t care to much about incompatibility, PIM or synchronisation.
- Other people wanting a PDA + a mini laptop are realizing that there\'s not hope. In all this big choice list, only pdaXrom and OE can give us something... perhaps... someday...
- The GTK/X11 versus QT/X11 from PC is now  also on PDA with Opie/QTE versus Qtopia/QTE versus X11/GTK/GPE versus X11/GTK/LinuxPy...
- Linux on PDA is still only for advanced user. Sharp begin to have problem in selling their Sharp 6000 even in Japan. They are trying to minimize the impact selling them only on online shop and also in US.
- No plan. No cohesion. No leader. No evolution. No money. No future.
- Still no way to escape from Windows empire. Standard users are still waiting for the Messiah.

[Stubear]

There are a number of projects that are under very active development (KO/PI and tetsu special kernel spring to mind) as well as some that are begging for support - OE and OZ.

Sharp doesn\'t seem to be doing any development (although there are quite a few apps available on the Japanese Sharp site)

THe X/QT team have made a lot of improvements recently, almost everything that works on Sharp will work on TKC and Cacko QTopia, while most of the X/QT stuff will work on pdaXRom although you might need to install some more libs etc.

If you feel that development has slowed then I suggest that you get out there and help some - not you don\'t need to be a developer to help, good testers and doc writers are also valuable

Stu