Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 Instruction Manual page 161

my Zaurus SL-C3000 and SL-C3100
The latest version of OpenZaurus for the C3x00 is 3.5.4.1 which is build with the 2.6.16 kernel
instead of the standard 2.4.20 kernel that the Zaurus was released with. OpenZaurus being a
bleeding edge distro, with lots of active development, has implemented many more advanced
features than the Sharp distro, however, as with all bleeding edge technologies, backward
compatability and stability is not always guaranteed and thus certain new features might break
existing features and/or applications inadvertantly. This is something very hard to avoid for
software projects unless you take Sharp's approach of not updating the environment and just
patching it up when forced to. OZ takes the opposite approach. It is constantly being build and it
integrates a lot of features from other Linux distros such as altboot and kexec. At the moment,
TCP/IP via USB client cable does not work when connecting to Windows. This is the biggest problem
I have with OZ since I like to plug it into my Windows PCs.
OZ also takes advantage of the MicroDrive available on the C3x00 and thus installs itself to the
MicroDrive instead of the flash. This of course has its advantages and disadvantages. On the C3000
this would be a great advantage, however, the same is also done for the C3100 and C3200 which
may or may not be as advantageous. The C3100 and C3200 are more or less treated like a C3000
on OZ since they are almost identical as opposed to what other distros do, which treat the C3100
like a C1000 with an extra harddisk.
OpenZaurus also boasts to have around 6000 packages and that their package dependencies all
work. However, this is not entirely true. They naturally forgot to mention how many of those
packages actually work. Unfortunately, a large percentage of those packages don't actually work or
are just mostly useless cannon fodder. Their large number also is a result that they split up every
component into a separate package. So while some distros convenniently have one single package
for an application, OZ would split it up into several dozen packages. Thus they need to heavily rely
on their package dependency to pull all these packages together. Needless to say that not all their
packages are up to date and not all dependencies resolve properly. Some packages have not been
updated for quite some time.
I believe that OZ has a lot of potential to be the best distro eventually. See my
see a list of customisations that I have applied. However, in its current state, it can be summarised
as fast but useless. OPIE looks good enough and is quite fast, but it lacks most of the essential
applications like a decent browser and office applications and it is not backward compatible and thus
cannot run applications from Sharp/Cacko. GPE is quite ugly but pretty fast as well. However, it is
buggy and unstable too. In theory, OZ can do everything perfectly, however, in practice, it is quite
a long way from that goal.
Zaurus users generally want to take advantage of all the features available on their superior devices
and not lose functionality that is standard and working quite nicely with the stock Sharp
ROM/distro. One thing the OZ team needs to do to woe more Zaurus users is to provide at least the
same feature rich applications and functionality as the other distros already have. They should
161 of 212
http://www.users.on.net/~hluc/myzaurus/
custom OZ page to
16/09/2007 12:23