Hi folks.
I have been a member of the Opie and OZ community since almost its start.
Almost 2 years ago I have quit supporting it due to the high workload my new job provided and bought a symbian smartphone to take care of my daily tasks. However it has proven to be not quite the tool I had in mind so a few months ago I have taken the occasion to buy a Sharp C1000 device and have tried to work with it for my daily business with various configurations.
As a result I would like to share my thoughts and experiences with you.
I started with the Sharp ROM. It worked out of the box using WLAN, Bluetooth and PIM for may daily business so I extended it with various applications.
Even syncing Outlook went smooth following certain rules and KaPi/Kopi served as the better PIM alternative for me.
However I have always felt that this is a dead end road when it comes to drivers and support and as a result I tried the Cacko ROM.
Went even smoother and provided me with all means of a productive tool due to its 100% compatibility with the Sharp ROM.
I could not resist to take a look at the various other options then- especially the distributions based on X11 looked very interesting due to the high amount of desktop applications- namely Sylpheed, Firefox and Notecase and a lot of others.
The option XQt seemed to provide what I needed- Qt feeling including productivity apps and the X world. It was quickly recognised that that road to go would lead to a ressource and performance problem.
PdaXRom looked not bad but lacked of decent productivity and syncing capabilities and the old 2.4 kernel and gcc2.x seemed not the modern trail I wanted to follow.
So I returned to OZ.
As far as I can tell now Opie is still the productivity and office tool I wanted to have with various apps. But it lacks support and applications.
GPE seems still to be miles away when it comes to integration into a non Linux world which unfortunately is still a must in most offices, namely Outlook integration.
Now a X server on a different virtual terminal is running and I have tried to use different Window Managers. Enlightenment seems not very clean to use but is powerful- however it does not cooperate well with different virtual terminals using the entrance login manager.
Currently I use Fluxbox as WindowManager of my choice which I still have to set up appropriately. the whole thing is still not very well integrated but its getting better and better.
From my point of view the solution would be to have an Opie build on top of a X based Qt library which would bring the best of both worlds.
I would like to open the discussion here, maybe there is a demand for discussion on experiences et al.
Regards,
Oliver