Rom Comparisons

[vanstrien]

I saw Taim ask about ROMs in the other post to the Pittsburgh ZUG.  Just thought I might be able to shed some light with my experiences.

The major ROMs to consider are OpenZaurus, Sharp, TKC, Cacko/Crow.  

I love the OpenZaurus rom.  It has some sweet features (such as the battery monitor actually being accurate, good configuration options, etc).  I normally use it with the 64-0 configuration, in which you don\'t have a ramdisk, and instead can make it so your filesystem is spread between Flash and SD card.  The biggest problem though is that such a configuration is quite slow, and OZ is very unstable when it comes to different CF cards.  It tends to freeze for thirty seconds or more when I try to swap cards, or turn it on with some cards.  For that reason I really don\'t use it anymore, although things like Kismet and Wellenreiter seem to work better on it.

The Sharp rom is, well, standard.  So there isn\'t much to say about it.

The Cacko/Crow roms have some real potential, but I have had problems installing them.  

My favorite rom right now is the TKC rom.  I\'d really suggest it if you aren\'t on OZ.  It is very stable, has some nice features such as a very good looking interface and preinstallation of SubApplet.  I think it will continue to be extended as well, as they appear to be supporting the person who originally did the mod for them.

I\'d be curious to know if anyone else in the Pittsburgh ZUG have tried other roms and what they think...

[Taim]

I have tried Sharp ROMS and several OZ ROMS (2.37+).  

I wasn\'t too happy with the Sharp ROMS.  As you said, Sharp ROMs are awefully standard.  I also found that installing other ipkgs became more of a burden with the Sharpies as libs and ipkg dependencies became a nightmare.  I have, however been pretty impressed with the 3.10 ROM.  One of the biggest improvements included the seperation of Hancom, Jeode, Opera from the main distribution.

OZ ROMs allowed me to run more ipkgs w/o all the fun dependeny issues.  Almost all the applications you wanted to run were all centrally located.  I wasn\'t too thrilled with initial ipkg managment, it seemed a little sloppy, some of the applications didn\'t work out of the box, etc.  With the release of 3.2, that is no longer an issue.   However, I am now pretty concerned over the lack of work being done on OZ.  I don\'t feel as comfortable running OZ at the moment as it is pretty dated and still has numerous bug-fixes needed.  One of my biggest beefs is that OZ is behind on kernel updates.  This is, however, pretty understandable as Sharp has contractual obligations that delay patched kernel sources from being released in a timely fashion.  I did have to send a few SDs back from the pre 3.1 releases (Thats why I now read up on all releases OZ or Sharpie.  I should have never formatted them in the first place :)

Recently most of the issues noted above have been made moot with better ipkgs being made available from many different sources.  I am a very curious user, and am always looking for the best solutions available.  I am a flavor of the hour kind of person.   I can\'t really say any one ROM is better than another.  The best way to find your favorite ROM is to try them for yourself and make a decision from there.