Slashdot Mirror
Testdrive A Linux iPAQ
Russ Nelson writes "If you weren't lucky enough to be at OSCon to see Jim Gettys' unobtainium, or my Linux iPAQ playing MP3's off Chris DiBona's gigabyte Microdrive (I downloaded madplay from the Familiar unstable feed with my 802.11 card, removed that, and inserted Chris's microdrive and it all Just Worked®), then at least you can test drive a Linux iPAQ via Compaq's Test Drive program. They have a webcam pointing at the screen." Having seen the device in real life - this thing rocks. Compaq: Please bring it into production, say, next week? *grin*
If you look closely at the videoconferencing image in that report, you'll notice that the audio jack is on the left side of the BackPAQ. This discriminates against LHPs (left-handed persons) who wish to use the device.
With 15-30% of the population using their left hands, why are product designers so biased to the right? How difficult woud it be to relocate the jack to a more ambidextrous location? Can't we all just get along?
Compaq's testdrive is a free service offered to developers who want to test their code on different systems. It is composed of like 2 dozen OS/hardware configurations including Linux, several flavors of Unix, and NT. Users can get an account, FTP over their code and try it out. It was originally created for porting test, but also makes a good place to just develop for different evironments.