i have been hearing alot about OZ, but close to nothing on why you should use it. i will be receiving my C1000 from Conics in a few days, and am trying to decide whether or not to keep the Sharp ROM.
Convince me- why should i use OZ?
from what i have inferred, GPE has the ability to run some Gnome-compatible software, but does not have as big of a program/user base (i need Gimp and Audacity, specifically). Opie is more widely used, but does not run X11.
i am not a complete n00b, but i am relatively (2 months) new to linux...
semi-nerd talk is OK
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It would sort of help if you told the audience what you were planning to use your Zaurus for.
There are 4 main ROMs and a few variant ROMs.
1. Sharp ROM - Pre-installed on device by default.
2. Cacko ROM - Built out of pieces of Opie/Openzaurus and pieces of the original Sharp ROM.
3. Openzaurus - Has two interfaces available: Opie and GPE.
4. X11 - More Laptop-like functionality.
The first three ROMs are primarily designed as your typical PDA-style Operating System. They're heavily graphics oriented and heavily organized towards pocket-planner functions. Ie they have Addressbook, Datebook/Alarm, and ToDo List.
Opie/Openzaurus is, in many ways, the more advanced of the three in terms of PDA functionality. Many of the features that you would find on PALM or PPC are included in Opie, and the user interface is simply stunning. The penalty for this is that Opie is sometimes a 'bleeding-edge' experience. I spent two weeks trying to get some kind of media-player functionality to work and never did. Also, many functions that PPC or PALM users now take for granted (ie the ability to open Word and Excel attachments/files) may not be present in Opie or may be very rudimentary. A lot of the developers' efforts is going towards refining and perfecting the Opie interface and Apps are taking a bad seat. This isn't bad, nor a criticism, but it does limit what you can do in Opie. When I was using it solely to check appointments, etc. it was delightful. When I tried to use Opie-sheet to manipulate excel files, it was a difficult process.
Sharp is very robust if you use only the Apps built into the original ROM. After that, it becomes buggy and crash-prone. The Sharp interface is visually unpleasant--leaning towards ugly, and the built-in Apps, while somewhat integrated, have very kludgy interfaces, and, in the conversion to English, you will find that some features don't go away. So you will have kanji characters or annoying boxes in some places, and you will not be able to make these go away. The included Hancom apps actually work fairly well for manipulating Excel or Word files--provided they're not too big and provided they have no graphics/tables/special characters embedded within. They're better than Opie-Sheet was, last time I tried it (Version 1.17. They're up to Version 1.20 now). However, they still have issues. You're limited to small files, and you can't have cross-links and other embedded items in Hancom Sheet like you can in Docs-to-Go on a Palm Pilot.
Cacko is, in many ways, a prettied-up Sharp ROM (apologies Maslovsky). Anton Maslovsky and his merry men stupkid and iamasmith, have tidied up the interface, rid the ROM of some of its more annoying foibles, and added a lot of the eye-candy that makes Opie so attractive. Unfortunately, because they have to work with Sharp binaries for which they have no source code, there are definite limits as to what they can and can't do. This means that some of the more egregiously annoying things (package-manager, for example) are what they are and can't be fixed without breaking other things. Things may get better with the C-1000 and C-3000. They don't have the annoying ATI graphics chip onboard, but use the Intel X-Scale API instead. This means that some of the graphics enhancements are within reach as the ATI interface was closed-source and very few understand how to work with it.
X11, as previously mentioned, is less geared towards PDA functionality. I have little experience with X11, so can't really comment on its strengths or provenance, except to say that if you're looking at workstation functionality, you've probably bought the wrong gizmo.
