Comment Re:SL-5500 sucks (Score 2, Interesting) 163
Agreed - I just sold mine on eBay. It rated highly on the hackability scale, but pretty low on the usability scale.
For one thing, trying to install one of the open-source linux distros on it was like trying to install linux on a PC circa 1998 - ultimately frustrating.
Basic installation was easy, but after that you had to tweak, and tweak, and tweak. Neither of the two main distros (GPE and OPIE) come with a web browser in the default installation, so you must install them separately. OPIE had a version of konquerer that I couldn't install for about 2 weeks as the package dependencies couldn't be found in the openzaurus package repository. Proceed to google groups and start searching for threads to solve the issue. Once konquerer was installed, it sucked. It would crash constantly, to the point of being unusable.
So, want to try GPE? Well, until the latest release a few months ago, suspend/resume didn't work right on the Zaurus, which basically made it unusable.
Want to sync the Zaurus with a PC? You can tweak a bunch of config files and settings to try to get multisync working if you're running GPE, and even then syncronization is spotty. Running OPIE? You could sync fine, if you wanted to use the somewhat outdated Qtopia Desktop as your PIM software on the desktop.
Did you remember to install a hack that puts your root filesystem onto removable memory, like an SD card? No? Whoops - you're out of internal memory space! Start again!
The Zaurus probably would have given a much better experience if I'd had some idea of the state of Linux on the Zaurus - I had expected it to behave a lot like a modern linux distro on a PC. As it is, the learning curve for establishing even basic functionality (like getting a working web browser and some kind of sync solution up and running) was so steep that a month after I got it, I was still trying to work out the kinks.
Well, it was fun to play with if you like to tinker, anyway.
For one thing, trying to install one of the open-source linux distros on it was like trying to install linux on a PC circa 1998 - ultimately frustrating.
Basic installation was easy, but after that you had to tweak, and tweak, and tweak. Neither of the two main distros (GPE and OPIE) come with a web browser in the default installation, so you must install them separately. OPIE had a version of konquerer that I couldn't install for about 2 weeks as the package dependencies couldn't be found in the openzaurus package repository. Proceed to google groups and start searching for threads to solve the issue. Once konquerer was installed, it sucked. It would crash constantly, to the point of being unusable.
So, want to try GPE? Well, until the latest release a few months ago, suspend/resume didn't work right on the Zaurus, which basically made it unusable.
Want to sync the Zaurus with a PC? You can tweak a bunch of config files and settings to try to get multisync working if you're running GPE, and even then syncronization is spotty. Running OPIE? You could sync fine, if you wanted to use the somewhat outdated Qtopia Desktop as your PIM software on the desktop.
Did you remember to install a hack that puts your root filesystem onto removable memory, like an SD card? No? Whoops - you're out of internal memory space! Start again!
The Zaurus probably would have given a much better experience if I'd had some idea of the state of Linux on the Zaurus - I had expected it to behave a lot like a modern linux distro on a PC. As it is, the learning curve for establishing even basic functionality (like getting a working web browser and some kind of sync solution up and running) was so steep that a month after I got it, I was still trying to work out the kinks.
Well, it was fun to play with if you like to tinker, anyway.
