Have Just Purchased A Simpad (again)

[douglasamcintosh]

Hello Opensimpad forums,

Have just purchased an SL4 off eBay after flogging my previous one for twice the price a couple of years ago. Having been out of the Simpad scene for a while I am looking for some advice on what to do (I am comfortable flashing roms).

Previously I tried an Opie image on my Simpad but frankly it was not that good and did not work very well. The Windows CE images both had their advantages and disadvantages.

My intended use for the Simpad is fairly standard, web browsing, ebook reading (as many formats as possible), PDF reader, RSS reading  and possibly some light gaming. The simpad comes with some kind of Sandisk CF WiFi card which has built in memory.

My questions are:

1) Will the CF WiFi card work with any of the linux based images?

2) Which image is best for the purposes I have described? I am quite tempted by the Opie image.

3) Are the packages kept fairly up to date?

Any info and advice would be gratefully appreciated. Sorry for the vagueness.

Douglas

[mr_nice]

1) Will the CF WiFi card work with any of the linux based images?
-> The WiFi part of the card should work. The memory part do not work! And it will only be fixed if you provide kernel patches.
I recomand  the i-gate card which i use with wpa.
2) Which image is best for the purposes I have described? I am quite tempted by the Opie image.
-> Angstrom images are a good choice. I personaly use the opie image and like it a lot  but the x11 image is also fine.
3) Are the packages kept fairly up to date?
-> Well - yes and no.
The stable branch gets only bugfixes (so the stable image)
The unstable image gets a lot new packages but changes often and also breaks some times!
And no - you cannot mix the unstable/stable feeds
I use the unstable for developing and the stable for daly work. If you like a package backported then you can add it to this list [1]

best regards
mr nice

1 http://linuxtogo.org/gowiki/AngstromStableChangelog

[douglasamcintosh]

Thanks for the response. Quite useful

Not really bothered about the memory part of the card not working. I'll just swap in a CF card full of ebooks when I am not browsing.

Chances are I'll start with CE, get fed up as I hit the limits, try one of the Angstrom images (probably Opie) which is what happened last time I had a simpad. Looks like opie reader has a pretty large selection of ebook formats it supports.

Thanks again,

Douglas