Hello Ian,
I also aim to use the Zaurus as a "mini laptop" for office use.
For 1.5 years I have used Cacko 1.23 ROM which needed, in order to satisfy my needs, a lot of tweaking, and even then it did not everything I wanted. For example there was no good Excel compatible spreadsheet (yes, gnumeric under pdaXQTrom, but that was too slow for serious use IMHO).
QTopia is kind of heavy and slow at all.
See the details of my setup here:
Zaurus productivity setup with CackoI'm now in the process of switching to pdaXrom 1.1.0beta3.
So far this seems to be far better than Cacko for my needs.
One downside so far: Fonts and layout is not optimized for "PDA usage" of the Z, i.e. depending on the condition of your eyes you may want to adjust a lot of font sizes, window sizes etc.
But aside from that, pdaXrom is much more suitable for such a productivity setup.
I don't know in particular if it will meet your printer requirement, but I think all other requirements are met as far as I can see it after 3 days of heavy configuring.
pdaXrom is lightweight, fast and much more straightforward (i.e. much better to overlook system-wise) than Cacko. Much less specialities to deal with, much more like a normal X setup.
And of course much more software available for productivity purposes, which is still actively developed.
My experience with Cacko / Qtopie is that there is a lot of "medium-quality" software available, which has been developed up to a certain state and then the (lone) developer has lost interest and abandoned the product.
Under X there is much more high-quality software available wihch is still developed by a bunch of professional developers.
Example:
The stageOne outliner under Qtopia is a quite good outliner (missing some important fetures, though), but the developer doesn't seem to eb interested in either continue developing or releasing the code.
Now I'm looking for a good outliner under pdaXrom and have found (and got recommended) some VERY interesting projects I have to evaluate now.
Example:
Email client. The QTopia email client meets the basic needs but has some significant drawbacks (opening the attachment dialog needed 10 minutes for me because it scans the entire hard drive for file which could be attached).
So I have instaled mutt on the console, which worked very nicely, but also had a few drawbacks which I could not solve, e.g. special characters couldl not be processed and displayed properly due to locale problems under Cacko.
Addditionally, the setup needed many, many hours because it consist of a lot of components which partially had to be compiled fist.
Now under pdaXrom I have sylpheed-claws, which has every feature I need, is graphical, has no problems with Umlauts etc. and setup needed a few minutes.
I would strongly recommend you to have a look at pdaXrom.
People here are very, very patient and knowledgable if you need help.
Also, pdaXrom seems to be very stable and convenient to use now (the beta3, not beta4!). So it's not the "bleeding edge" anymore.
When I have finished my setup, I will document it in a similar way as the Cacko setup above.
daniel
