Zaurus Development with Qtopia

Radical Rad writes "There is a great article by Bruce Forsberg at Linux Gazette for anyone wanting to develop for the Zaurus platform. Using a mileage calculator as an example, he covers step by step setting up the Qtopia SDK, compiling, testing with the Zaurus emulator, and finally cross-compiling and creating the distribution package. He covers all the bases including compile-time environment variables and the control file for the ipkg."

Comments

Re:Great news

[RevAaron]

Well, I don't really think it's more flexible. There is potential for it to be more flexible, but considering the mindset of most Linux developers, I don't think it will be in the end. While I still have hopes, I don't see much innovation (excuse the poor word) coming out of OZ or Sharp ROMland. No doubt it will improve, perhaps even rival other platforms in some areas someday.

Unless by flexible you mean having the ability to compile pretty easily a wide variety of apps which don't really belong on the Z, in which case yes. But I've actually (and regrettably) found WinCE-based PDAs to be more flexible than the Zaurus in terms of software available and what you can do with it. What kinds of flexibility where you thinking of?

The stuff usually cited by Z fans as being a part of this flexibility- SSH/telnet, VNC, X11, perl or python programming, having a shell, etc all can be done on WinCE, and often times its easier to setup on WinCE than it is on PDA Linux for these Unix packages. You've also got a better chance finding a front-end or an adapted version of this package for the smaller-screen, smaller-resource configuration of a PDA with a WinCE port than the Zaurus version. I kind of assumed that it would work out the otherway when I bought my Z and find I have more *practical* desktop Unix software ports on my Jornada 720 than on my Zaurus.

That said, no other mobile platform beats Opera and Konq on the Z for speed and quality of the browser. Pocket IE on PocketPC is pretty bad, but IE on Handheld PC 2000 (also WinCE 3.0-based) is a lot better...