Is the Agenda VR3 Linux PDA Dead?

An Anonymous Coward writes: "LinuxDevices.com has published a news item about the uncertain future of Agenda Computing and their VR3 linux PDA. According to the article, some members of the Agenda developer community are continuing work on current projects, but many have switched to other projects such as the Sharp Zaurus. Apparently there is an Agenda Germany office which is still shipping the VR3s (including to the U.S.) and which has said that they are continuing VR3 development -- but's not clear whether that means software or device development. Looks like another cool linux device has bitten the dust. Sigh."

Comments

Re:Why are people surprised?

[ProfessorPuke]

I've got an Agenda (although I waited until the price had dropped more than 50%). Strangly, the resolution and monochromeness were both selling points for me! The resolution is better than a Palm (160x240 vs 160x160, due to no Graffiti area), and monochrome means much better battery life.

However, their hardware spec was still hugely flawed. Some of the more obvious deficiencies:

• /dev/dsp: They built in sound hardware (input and output!), with a port for a nokia-style earmike. But to this day no useful software has used it. An mp3 player isn't too much fun when you've got maybe 3 megabytes storage free.
• too small: It's SMALLER than most Palms! That sounds like an advantage, but the fact is, the customers for a Linux device are going to be geeky hackers, and willing to look like a nerd for hauling around a huge brick of hardware. If the Agenda had been slightly bigger, not slightly smaller, then there may have been room for AA batteries (much longer life), more RAM, more flash, or who knows.
• not enough memory: Here's the memory on my unit: \w\$ cat /proc/meminfo total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached: Mem: 7798784 7487488 311296 0 0 729088 Swap: 0 0 0 MemTotal: 7616 kB MemFree: 304 kB ... 8 meg is adequate. I guess. Barely. If they could've bumped it up to 16, the device would've been much more useful. Today hardware hackers enjoy pulling apart SIMMs to solder in this upgrade themselves- if its that easy, the factory should've done it.
• not enough storage: Same deal as the RAM. Had 8, should've had 16. Most of the 8 was already exhausted by kernel, /bin, /usr/bin/X11R6, /usr/bin/games, etc. With 16 flash, the out-of-box device would've come mostly empty, instead of mostly full, which is a world of difference. Many Palm users felt decieved when they found that the advertised "8 megs of storage" wasn't all usable for their contacts and appointments. Here's the stats:
  \w\$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/mtdblock0 3.3M 212.0k 3.0M 6% /flash
• Replaceable batteries: You had to unscrew the case to change the AAA batteries, rather than being able to slap it in the dock every night and never think about losing power, like you can with many Palms and PocketPC units. That would've been an especially important advantage for a device whose usefulness come from software hacking. You want to plug it in, export DISPLAY=workstation:0, and beging to code, without worrying that operating the serial port drains batteries faster than normal unplugged operation. This problem reduced the convenience of developing new software for the Agenda, which thus reduced the benefit that a Free Software operating system should've given them.
• No USB: USB is cool, what can I say? A USB port could've not only handled the recharge problem from the same plug as the data, but it would've had better bandwidth too, and not require a nonstandard serial-port adapter. And imaging if the PDA could emulate a USB mass-storage device to export its filesystem to random PCs you meet throughout the day (kinda like the Terapin Mine, but that's a $700 system).

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. If they'd done just 1 or 2 of those rather simple improvements, they could've justified the higher price to average users.

Re:Oh well, a lesson learned

[Jay Carlson]

Their code base was not all GPL

No, it isn't all GPL; a lot of it is covered by the LGPL and X11 licenses. :-)

Seriously, we have the source to every bit on the device. And I mean Open Source. It did take some effort to get the X11 sources, and source for the PMON boot loader, but we have them all. I know this because Brian Webb, who isn't an Agenda employee, rebuilt everything from source to support my snow ABI, which is not binary compatible---if it wasn't rebuilt, it wouldn't work!

We're still working on automating the rebuild. Right now, doing this rebuild is a manual process, but I think we're a few weeks away from having a big "make World" that will spit out a cross compiler and then a romdisk image.

Now, if you're fretting about PDAs with components that aren't Open Source, go check out the Zaurus. Its Java implementation is proprietary. (If you want to write apps for it, they have to be GPL'd unless you're a Troll licensee; I guess some people see that as a positive thing.)

and the device was expensive

$250 always seemed a touch high to me. I think there's a Linux PDA niche somewhere below the iPaqs, competing directly with low-end Palm devices. LinuxDA is a little too low end for my taste; I want virtual memory. I would think that had Agenda's parent company not stumbled, pricing on the VR3 would have come down.

I don't remember an NDA on their developer pages.

(I wish people would stop moderating articles with "overrated/underrated" just to avoid metamod; the parent is at score 3 with no moderation reason. And the parent msg is substantially incorrect.)