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Lycoris Shipping Linux OS For Handhelds
Bill Kendrick writes "According to LinuxDevices.com, it appears Lycoris has put together an OS for handhelds like the iPAQ and Zaurus. It's based on the Open Source OpenZaurus and OPIE projects, so it should look pretty familiar to Linux-on-PDA fans."
On the lycoris website, it says
Buy Desktop/LX pre-loaded on PCs at WalMart.com! Check out the entire line of MicroTel Desktop/LX- Certified PCs ranging from $199 to $558.
I thought that was Lindows market. Has WalMart dumped Lindows or are they coexisting? If the latter, that will be extra confusing for Joe Sixpack buying Linux at WalMart
Also, you can always use the Zaurus to view pictures taken on a digital camera. One time I was borrowing a friend's digital camera for a photo shoot, and rather than hold on to the camera I just used my Zaurus to copy the contents off the camera's CF card, and then when I got home used my CF WiFi card to transfer the images to my computer. Worked wonderfully.
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
look at handhelds.org there is a way to back up your rom so that if you don't like linux on it you can bring pocket pc back. But I'm not sure, I have never done that...
Looking at the site (http://www.opensistemas.com/Gentoo_for_Zaurus.715 .0.html#) shows the Zaurus doing the "emerge" part and the main PC doing the compiling.
There is a bootloader which can load either CE or Linux. The bootloader takes up a relatively small amount of flash, so once that's in place, you can reinstall CE or Linux as much as you want. It's not exactly a point-and click procedure, but it's not too hard.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Some inside info about Cacko Linux : We are about to port our environment to others PDA such as ARM based Palm.. :)
So, if you think Qtopia is too slow or Zaurus/iPaq are too expensive... Wait a moment
Trolling using another account since 2005.
It looks quite similar to me. Eye candy is a bit different, but not much more than that. It looks to be basically the same functionally with a brand applied. The sync application is perhaps the biggest custom piece, tho i've no problem syncing data from my zaurus (calendar, mail and contacts) to evolution. Ssh, scp, http, for the rest. Don't get me wrong, the Z is _great_, but don't put it off to wait for this distribution, and if you are considering, consider the C7x0 series.
Andrew
I think one of the main reasons that people are having to stick with the 2.4.6 and 2.4.18 kernels is because of the binary-only SD driver from Sharp.
The distro uses openzaurus, which has the opie windowing system. Opie was originaly forked off of Qtopia, an embedded qt qui and pim software that draws directly to the frambuffer, so no x is needed. X can be run the the devices, but the screen on some of the zaruii can be as small as 320x320 so x may not be the best option.
Visualize Whirled Peas
I doubt anyone would like to use linux on their PDA.. at least from the quality of the PIM apps i see on the desktop.
I installed Linux to upgrade the PIM apps from the very limited ones on my iPaq. Opie provides a much nicer environment for standard ToDo, Calendar, Contacts and Notes. WinCE provides nicer voice recording and some interesting input methods. I'd rather have the better apps that I'll use regularly. DateBk5 on my Palm III still blows them out of the water... but I can emulate Palm on Linux.
The nicest thing is that I can use PyQt on it. I can create a form with QtDesigner, do the typical GUI dev cycle of clicking on the widgets and writing Python code for what it should do when it is clicked, scrolled, loaded, etc. The whole thing is converted into two .py files (one for the UI, one for the main code), and I can copy it over to my iPaq... really fast and easy custom app creation. Custom databases, little useful apps... the kind of uses that make PDAs really shine.
if you cant take down a meeting time or a note and sync it with your PC.
Between DrawPad and Kate, I can take notes much easier than on any PDA. I use Palm Grafitti for input when doing lots of text, or DrawPad to made quick scribbles. As for meeting times, you hit the Calendar button, pick the date and go... the same as every other PDA. Syncing is quick, easy and works fine.
I use unison to sync, but that's because my entire home LAN uses unison to backup all systems to a file server. Everything that appears on the network (and is configured as one of "my" systems) gets automatically synced if it hasn't in the past 24 hours. With my iPaq, that's right after it hits the cradle and is automatically assigned an IP address.
That's a bit more difficult to set up than the default sync (which has a nice GUI interface on the PDA), but I mention it because that's the kind of thing that admins in large office networks would give their eyeteeth to be able to do. As soon as an employee's PDA goes in a cradle, it is backed up to the server... the entire thing. If they run over it with their car, they simply go to the Help Desk, fill out a loss form, and get a new PDA... configured precisely as their old one was, every app, every note, every setting, identical.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I don't see why everyone is so excited about this Lycoris Linux distribution. I mean, Linux has been avaiable for iPaqs and Zauruses for years. The Familiar Linux Distribution for iPaqs is in version 0.7.2, and is in my opinion very stable already. And for Zauruses, not only does it run Linux out of the box, but the OpenZaurus project has provided an alternative for users. Both of these projects already have Opie, a Qtopia look-a-like as an option for desktop environments, but you can also use GPE as well.
This comment was thought up very late at night and does not necessarily reflect my views at a more reasonable hour.
Used to be the case, but not really any more. The handhelds.org CVS has the source for an open source SD driver that is modular enough to support different devices. OpenZaurus's kernel guy has most of the info he thinks he needs to do a new SD driver, but what is really lacking is the time to do the ports to 2.6 for the different devices.
He has started working on it, and you actually can the C7x0 devices to "boot" 2.6.somethingorother on a serial console, but the flash and fb drivers still haven't been ported yet.