Some Thoughts And Experiences...

[btanoue]

Hi all,

The PDA-X-Rom Its truely something unique that only a linux based device is capable of delivering

My buddy with a HP PocketPC (Who knows which one, but its a newer one) is really jealous about the Zaurus, specifficaly the cool software and the keyboard.

On Windowmanagers:
It seems that after a long night, or some amount of hrs when I turn on my C1000, what ever app I was in is killed.  The screen blinks a few times and then it comes back to matchbox.  Bothersome yes...would I go back to opie no.  I just wanted to know if others have seen this behavior.

Should I consider using ice or something else as a window manager?  Will all my apps be there if I install ice or fluxbox or XFCE?  How are the performance of these on my little Z?  Are the applets available for said window managers.

KDE...How long does that take to run on a chroot Debian Zaurus?

On Firefox:
It seems it takes about 30 seconds to load from my SD card.  I was wondering if it was because I needed a faster SD card or is it that slow for everyone?

On OpenOffice
Come on..how long does that take to run?  I haven't seen any hard numbers.  If firefox takes 30 seconds, openoffice must take 10 mins, does it need a huge swap file?

On Video:
I can compress 30 minuite cartoons to 128Megs, at 320x240 Xvid 4 and play them fine with vlc on the command line.  Is there a gui for this?  or perhaps a plugin for xmms?

I also see that many advanced users create some great packages.  Perhaps there should be feed setup by the pda-x-rom team to let users upload good working packages like KA/PI so we all don't have to search for a download in the forum.  I think many of you would agree that it would be great to just install znester for a user-contrib feed.

Please feel free to share your thoughts and answer any questions that I have posed.

Thats the great thing about the open-source community!

Thanks for your time,
btanoue

[adf]

there is a kde 3.4 for pdaxrom. it works..and is kinda cool. no need to chroot

the other wms..ice and xfce should show your apps just fine

vlc has a gui.  mplayer has given me better, much better, video playback.

firefox is just big. a faster sd probably won't make any diff on a Z anyway.
my solution is multiple browsers.. a heavy, firefox or moz..and a light, dillo or links
atm I have dillo, firefox, mozilla, links, full konqueror, embedded konqueror all installed. This is probably some kind of obsessive excess, but you get the idea.

if you have a microdrive, a real swap partition migh help.

[desertrat]

On OpenOffice
Come on..how long does that take to run?  I haven't seen any hard numbers.  If firefox takes 30 seconds, openoffice must take 10 mins, does it need a huge swap file?

When I used it under Cacko rom + X/Qt, it takes about 1-2mins to start up. But once started it is pretty useable. Pity the poor PocketPC users with their "PocketOffice"  

-- cheers

[gromituk]

On Windowmanagers:
It seems that after a long night, or some amount of hrs when I turn on my C1000, what ever app I was in is killed.  The screen blinks a few times and then it comes back to matchbox.  Bothersome yes...would I go back to opie no.  I just wanted to know if others have seen this behavior.

This is a quick fix to overcome a more serious problem of the window manager locking up if the Z has been suspended for too long.  The only way out of this is to pull the battery or log in remotely by ssh and kill X, I think.

I agree it's annoying.  On my 860 I don't think it kills the app but it takes a long time to refresh everything, and the desktop goes back to 1.  If you are silly enough to switch the Z off during this process, it locks up as before.

[btanoue]

there is a kde 3.4 for pdaxrom. it works..and is kinda cool. no need to chroot

the other wms..ice and xfce should show your apps just fine

vlc has a gui.  mplayer has given me better, much better, video playback.

firefox is just big. a faster sd probably won't make any diff on a Z anyway.
my solution is multiple browsers.. a heavy, firefox or moz..and a light, dillo or links
atm I have dillo, firefox, mozilla, links, full konqueror, embedded konqueror all installed. This is probably some kind of obsessive excess, but you get the idea.

if you have a microdrive, a real swap partition migh help.
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I'm curious to know how much room is need for KDE 3.4?  How does it run on the Zaurus?

Also, when I do click on vlc, it just seems to become idle.  Perhaps I'm doing something wrong.  Even at the command line I don't seem to get a gui.  Not that I'm a huge fan of them, but when I'm in the mall, and waiting for someone to shop, it would be nice to just point and click on a video or something.

Can I tell xmms to use mplayer to play video?

Also, can I create a link in the desktop to a script so that I can mount and unmount samba shares?