Zaurus good for "road coders"?

[Anonymous]

I would like opinions from people who done any sort of development work on the Zaurus.  Is the device at all suitable for this purpose?  I would like a small device for getting work done on the road, and although a small subnotebook (like the Fujitsu Lifebook) is one option, there\'s an appeal to just being able to pull an small, instant-on, Linux device like the Zaurus out of my pocket.  Some specific concerns are, 1) is the keyboard useful enough?  2) what about editors in general (I\'m assuming Emacs isn\'t the best choice here?)    3)  Can gcc and javac be installed?  (C and Java are my most used languages, although I occasionally use others).  

Anyway, I\'m interesting in hearing any anecdotes and pros/cons about this.  Thanks!

[Anonymous]

I am sure you can get emacs to run, but since vi is the God of editors whywould you want to?

[TimW]

1) Not really, on the SL5* series devices, but it probably is okay on the clamshell devices.
2) I like jed but you can have uemacs (microemacs) and you can get tinykate if you don\'t want to use a console oriented editor.
3) Yes. I have g++ and (IIRC) kjc which is an alternative java compiler. I\'ve sen jikes around too.

But...you can run out of memory pretty quickly with g++ (though I have the developers SL5000D with half the amount of memory of the SL5500).

[cascadefx]

I would like opinions from people who done any sort of development work on the Zaurus.  Is the device at all suitable for this purpose?  I would like a small device for getting work done on the road, and although a small subnotebook (like the Fujitsu Lifebook) is one option, there's an appeal to just being able to pull an small, instant-on, Linux device like the Zaurus out of my pocket.  Some specific concerns are, 1) is the keyboard useful enough?  2) what about editors in general (I'm assuming Emacs isn't the best choice here?)    3)  Can gcc and javac be installed?  (C and Java are my most used languages, although I occasionally use others). 

Anyway, I'm interesting in hearing any anecdotes and pros/cons about this.  Thanks!

I use Zeditor and code in java on my 5600.  It is slow, but it passes meetings and long lunches without a fuss.  

No syntax highlighting with zeditor, but I don't really need it.

I use the java tools (compilation and so forth) available here:  Development Tools for programming on the zaurus

[aplanas]

You can define some words to be colorized with ZEditor. Also you can define block comments. There are 3 or 4 (w1, w2, w3, w4 I think) fields. Each field is a 'kind' of syntactical element, so if you put the words separated with a space and select a color, the editor will draw thouse words with that color. So, 4 fields = 4 groups = 4 colors + 1 comment color

[008]

vim with syntax highlighting + apache2 + php5 + C750 = bliss  

[Ian]

I use my C860 for (in decreasing order) perl, C, C++ and bash scripts.

For my commute (New York - buses and subways) it's perfect because of the tiny footprint and instant on/off characteristics. The C860 is probably the single most empowering tech device I've ever owned. It is also good for email and web surfing in the various Wi-Fi locations in NYC, although I don't use it so much for that. I have developed some large perl programs (1000+ lines) and modified some large C programs, although as the source gets bigger you will notice a slowdown in the editors. My editor of choice is tkcEditor (make sure you get the Cx00 version) which has syntax colouring and so on. It's commercial software and you can get it from theKompany.com

You can install gcc with a pretty small footprint (about 7 MB) and perl is available in numerous variations from tiny to a big 30+ MB installation which I saw on the Zaurus Softwtare Index. There are some tweaks to get this stuff installed and running but they are very minor - just a few system variables etc - and I could even post them here. I'm not sure if the Zaurus GCC I use is still available on the net. Let me know if not and I'll post it somewhere.

Regards, Ian.

[vinc17]

I have an SL-C860, and in particular, I can run zsh, emacs (with various modes), perl, gcc (but this is only gcc 2.95.2 and it can't compile large C files like those in libxml2), ssh (client and server) and rsync for development and other things. I also run apache (for the local copy of my web site, in a cramfs file). Things I'm missing: libxml2/libxslt.

[rrashkin]

I use my 5500 a lot for coding when I'm on the road.  I do, however, find it better to use a larger keyboard (I have the Targus).  I don't know about jcc but I use the KOPI java compiler and it's just fine.  I use the regular text editor (Sharp/Qtopia) and rename afterward.

[salvy]

Hi,
i write you from Milano, Italia.
My questio regard Zaurus C860: i would know
1) Does anybody installed gnu development environment, gnu target simulator on this machine?
2) Does any tool avaible from open source community, precompiled for xscale architectures, go on this machine
3) problems for compiling packets (mainly developing tool) from source code.
I'm very interesting to by this automa.
Thank you for attention, hi

[tz]

I have a 760 and it works well - I've done various java and C coding with vim right on the Z.  ssh-ing to the Z is better if you have a bigger screen, but that sort of kills the point of portability.

That said, it is a bit cramped.  I generally do smaller tasks or debugging rather than long programs.

[doc]

I use the keyboard almost always when entering data...not editing files...rather than the software handwriting junk.

I have coded Qtopia programs for the Z, but almost always did it on a full sized keyboard running VNC...and have never actually compiled apps on the Z, but only used the cross-compiler on Linux.

[akpoff]

I would like opinions from people who done any sort of development work on the Zaurus.  Is the device at all suitable for this purpose?  I would like a small device for getting work done on the road, and although a small subnotebook (like the Fujitsu Lifebook) is one option, there's an appeal to just being able to pull an small, instant-on, Linux device like the Zaurus out of my pocket.  Some specific concerns are, 1) is the keyboard useful enough?  2) what about editors in general (I'm assuming Emacs isn't the best choice here?)    3)  Can gcc and javac be installed?  (C and Java are my most used languages, although I occasionally use others). 

Anyway, I'm interesting in hearing any anecdotes and pros/cons about this.  Thanks!

I use the X/QT build of emacs (check the downloads section of the X/QT homepage) on a Zaurus 6000 and so far it works great.  Keyboard mapping is a bit of a pain.  The built-in keyboard on the portrait Zauri (5x000 and 6000) don't have all the keys mapped for quick use (e.g., it has curly braces but you have to find them) but since the 6000 has a USB host adaptor it's quite easy to add an external keyboard.  I need to find or make a new keymap for it.  The mappings for a standard US keyboard are totally off.  But it works great for most typing as is (see screenshots):

[img]http://www.hypernote.com/others/zaurus/emacs/emacs_xqt_portrait.png\" border=\"0\" class=\"linked-image\" /]

and landscape:

[img]http://www.hypernote.com/others/zaurus/emacs/emacs_xqt_landscape.png\" border=\"0\" class=\"linked-image\" /]

With a little work you can even connect to X/QT from your PC/Mac-based X server and run emacs, sylpheed, etc.

It does load in a normal terminal but seems flaky but I haven't really spent a lot of time with it under a terminal.

[img]http://www.hypernote.com/others/zaurus/emacs/emacs_terminal_landscape.png\" border=\"0\" class=\"linked-image\" /]

As someone mentioned, you can get microemacs.

--Aaron

[vinc17]

Unfortunately, there's only an old version of gtk (1.2.10), while some applications need at least gtk 2.0.