Cringley's latest article includes impressive use

[vthomas]

See http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040930.html

Andrew Greig at Starnix in Canada seems to be living a geek's wet dream. Very impressive.

[kic]

That is absolutely wild. That's a great read.

I'm at a lot for how much he is able to do with his Zaurus. I'm still struggling to get a genesis emulator to work, and he does all of THAT with his? Man, talk about making me jealous!

I suddenly feel the inner geek stirring within me.

[djtreble]

*slobber*

[saakmotu]

Interesting. I already do the thin-client (well xdmcp logins, actually) stuff at home with cheapo p133 laptops connecting to my desktop machine/server.
Works great.

I didn't know you could go this far with a Zaurus.

I have seen that there is an XGA CF card on the zaurus.com site
http://www.myzaurus.com/acc_Comm8.asp

but that would use up your CF slot...  I wonder how he's getting connected to his monitor?

[mussi]

What I'm asking myself is how a SL6000 could run my 23" LCD screen with 1920x1600 pixels resolution.....

[kahm]

Interesting. I already do the thin-client (well xdmcp logins, actually) stuff at home with cheapo p133 laptops connecting to my desktop machine/server.
Works great.

I didn't know you could go this far with a Zaurus.

I have seen that there is an XGA CF card on the zaurus.com site
http://www.myzaurus.com/acc_Comm8.asp

but that would use up your CF slot...  I wonder how he's getting connected to his monitor?

Well, he pretty much has to use a CF card for VGA-out. That leaves him with the built in 802.11b for connectivty, which might be a little light for a thin client. His other option would be the sleeve and second CF slot, I suppose. I really wish there was a more detailed review of the set up.

[saakmotu]

Well, he pretty much has to use a CF card for VGA-out. That leaves him with the built in 802.11b for connectivty, which might be a little light for a thin client. His other option would be the sleeve and second CF slot, I suppose. I really wish there was a more detailed review of the set up.

oh yeah, I forgot the 6000 has built-in wifi
that should be fast enough.. my extended home network (to the xdmcp clients) is only 10baseT and it's fine.
still need to work out networked sound, but that's not for this thread

I don't see an obvious way on the page to get in touch with the author.

maybe someone should make a plea to the subject of the article.

this looks like the co. he works for  http://starnix.com/

[dsavard]

I don't see what is so amazing in turning a Z into a X server device? Maybe I miss something... The rest is almost hardware stuff: CF VGA adapter to driver a regular monitor, an IRK, a cellphone CF card for the cellphone function while on road.

Where is the magic?

[dsavard]

And money-wise you can use a much more cheap slim PC to accomplish the same task if you look only at the thin-client part. However, the business case is about replacing the desktop at home, at work and the PDA by a single device, what is untold about this, is it requires a server at home, so, no big deal there...

[akpoff]

I don't see what is so amazing in turning a Z into a X server device? Maybe I miss something... The rest is almost hardware stuff: CF VGA adapter to driver a regular monitor, an IRK, a cellphone CF card for the cellphone function while on road.

Where is the magic?

The big deal is that the CF VGA cards most of us have seen only refresh the screen once a second (or so).  We're wondering whether he found an alternative to get real time screen updates.  That or we're simply amazed that he can work effectively with such slow screen refreshes.  

Aaron

[dsavard]

Oh! I see, I was not awared of this fact about the CF VGA adapters. Of two things, or he is patient, or he is having managed to dedicate all his Zaurus resources + some tweaks to turn it into an acceptable performance X-terminal.  

[smammon]

Just recieved an email reply from Andrew Greig himself.  It appears that he may be mostly the lucky guinea pig in this case but promises to forward on our interest to their engineers.  Hopefully they will share how they accomplished all this.

[kahm]

Just recieved an email reply from Andrew Greig himself.  It appears that he may be mostly the lucky guinea pig in this case but promises to forward on our interest to their engineers.  Hopefully they will share how they accomplished all this.

Very nice. I'm very much looking forward to details!

An engineer friend of mine and I were introduced to the Zaurus while working in a Video conferencing research group at the University, so it will be very interesting to see where they've gone with this...

[acpkendo]

(running a special copy of Debian Linux, NOT as shipped by Sharp)

I'm curious as to what Debian he's using, and where I can get my hands on it.  OZ is a little Debian-like, but if it was OZ I'd have thought he'd say "OZ."  And also how he's driving the VGA. . .

Also, it should be noted that it doesn't specifically say in the article that Andrew's running X-based applications.  If he's a programmer, he could just as easily be using vi/emacs and compilers, etc... on the server.

[dsavard]

Just a reminder to kahm we are all waiting for the technical tricks used by Greig et ali, on how they make the CF XVGA to work in realtime.