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Inexpensive Handhelds for Linux?
Dr. Manhattan asks: "My PDA was stolen on a business trip, and I'm looking for a replacement. I've enjoyed Palms for their simplicity and long battery life, but I'm not afraid to program and I'm considering something that can run Linux. However, my budget is rather limited; $150 is all I can spend. Relatively obsolete tech is fine, but I'm looking for: good battery life (my old Palm could run for weeks on a charge; I'm hoping for double-digit hours), dual expansion slots, all of the onboard hardware solidly supported by Linux. Does such a beast exist in my price range?"
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http://froogle.google.com/froogle?price1=
Nope.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Jesus loves you, I think you suck
I'll sell you yours back for $100.
THIS ACCOUNT IS OFFICIALLY RETIRED/RETARDED.
However, my budget is rather limited. [...] Relatively obsolete tech is fine, but I'm looking for: "features that are not considered obsolete in the least"
I want my cake, and I better get to eat it too!
You can get them for about $150 on eBay. They have 1 SD/MMC slot, 1 CF slot, 64mb of ram and an insignificant amount of built in flash. You can get a 1GB SD card and a WiFi card and you will have what you want. The one problem is that the SD/MMC driver is binary only and keeps you stuck on 2.4.18 until (if ever) an MMC only driver gets written and GPL'd.
linuxdevices has a fairly comprehensive list of what is available. Unfortunately, you'll be disapointed. Your best bet might be to get an older Compaq iPaq and put Familiar on it. But the Compaq's don't have a built in keyboard, and the SD slot might not be supported under Linux.
To get a device you'll be happy with, it will cost from 300 - 800 dollars -- i.e., one of the Sharp Zaurus lines. They have built in keyboard, good display, sd & cf slots, etc. But support from Sharp is lacking -- they keep on discontinuing models, they totally screwed their community (by pulling the plug on the community development site). Of course support from zaurususergroup.com is good. But again, they are out of your price range.
Or, you could hold out till Palm comes out with their linux-based distribution. You might even be able to upgrade to it on existing arm/xscale based palm devices (which again might be out of your price range by a couple hundred).
The Zaurus SL-5500 fits your requirements for hardware and software (SD and CF expansion; runs linux and java natively; hardware fully supported by OS) but it's battery life is nowhere near double digit. With a good battery, I've had about 3 hours of solid use per charge, or somewhere a little less than a week of just standby. Plus, it started at $400 retail, so now on ebay it's running at $100 for a starting bid, only to go up. There's one on ebay now for about $165. If you're willing to go over budget slightly, that's a good choice.
Sorry but not in your price range.
,bluetooth and all the yummy UI goodness that Apple seems to have. down pat.
Plus Linux PDA are still in the "hacker" or "geek" area so the lack of programing could make difficult.
The Dell Axioms look very nice. Now if they would just run Linux....
I hear the new Palm OS will run Linux as the base much like Mac OS/X runs BSD.
I for one would really like to see Apple create a new Newton. Xscale 600 mhz, BSD, airport,
It would probably come with a hard drive so it would be an IPod replacment as well.
Why can I just see it interfaceing with a car so that it hooks to your cars' entertainment and navigation system as well. Hummmm.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
And I'm not just talking about handhelds, but the entire spectrum of hardware. Especially hardware that is difficult to find Linux drivers for. Video and soft-modem for example.
And obviously, handhelds preloaded with Linux, or at least easy to install GNU/Linux on them.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I have used both of these PDA's and while they ARE very good, and can be quite useful, you aren't going to get anywhere near the battery time you're used to. I was severely disappointed in the battery times of that PDA. I took it on a trip and used it alot as an MP3 player, which it was good at, except that I was always having to change batteries and charge them on the car charger. Pain in the butt!
But it wasn't limited to what you get when you play MP3's. A few hours max for the battery, really. The keyboard is a very nice layout and easy to type on even for my fat thumbs.
But, if you MUST have a linux handheld, and that's all you can spend, then its the ONLY thing in your budget.
If I were you, I'd compromise and get a PDA with a different OS and simply live with it. You'll get better battery times depending on what you pick.
Google and Ebay are your friend.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
...I need to get a Palm for one of my classes this semester, and was thinking along the same lines. I just need something cheap, I already have an iPod, so I don't need mp3 capability, stuff like wifi would be nice, but I don't really NEED it...
I was considering the PalmOne Zire21. Anyone know if/how well these work with Linux? Someone suggested LinuxDevices.com, and I couldn't find anything about it on there.
The best palmtop computer ever made.
Sorry to throw in a way-off-topic post, but I'm selling my ipaq 3650 after not using it for a year. It has familiar with Opie installed and worked great while I was using it. Alas, I have no use for it now, but contact me if you're interested.
Damien
I own a Zaurus SL-5500. The battery life is OK-ish with a battery extender (basically a box with four Mi-Mh AA rechargeables in it. Gives me about four hours). As a geek toy it's brilliant. I'm running OpenZaurus on it, and can SSH onto it from my other machines, and use it to control devices about the house, and, of course, it's interesting to use it with Kismet as a wireless "warwalker".
BUT... I wouldn't dream of using it as a PDA. To my mind, a PDA should be diary and addressbook (and maybe to-do lists), and streamlined for those purposes, and not try to be a desktop PC scaled down. I own (and depend heavily on) the cheapest Palm Zire for PDA purposes, and it interfaces with Linux just fine (J-Pilot is fantastic). I don't think I've ever even seen the battery icon go below 50%.
So it really depends what you are looking for. A geek toy (Zaurus!!) or something to organize your life (Palm!). I'm sure that the two COULD one day be built into one small device that runs for days on one charge, but currently you can have: (a) coolness and (b) long battery life plus usability. Pick any one.
I'm happy to inform you that you can get an iPaq h3800 series handheld on eBay for about $100-200, depending on its condition, the number of accessories, etc. The h3600 and h3700 series had problems with battery life, but the h3800 series solved that (mainly by putting a bigger battery in, but also by adjusting the requirements of the backlight). The h3800 also had an SD/MMC slot and Bluetooth.
HP is a huge sponsor of the handhelds.org project, which aims to get a good Linux distro on the iPaq, Zaurus, and (I think) Jornada handhelds. They run you through the installation process (and how to back up your original flash ROM in case you want to go back to Windows PocketPC) and provide a package management system and a host of other fun things. There are even a number of desktop environments:
Both of those desktop environments are available in the Familiar distro, which is the standard iPaq Linux distro. Familiar provides an X server, Python, Perl, ssh, vnc, etc, etc, etc, so if you don't mind programming, you'll probably feel quite okay.
There's another distro based on Familiar called Intimate. It's closer to a desktop distro, so you can install KDE, GNOME, the Mozilla Suite, Fluxbox, etc.
One caveat: The iPaq installation HOWTO says that you need either a serial cradle or a CompactFlash sleeve for your handheld, so before you bid on an auction, make sure it has one of those two features! Not all iPaqs sold have CF sleeves!
(Get this: after you install the bootloader, you get the base system uploaded and bootstrapped using... Zmodem! remember Zmodem?)
Standing at the very edge of my imagination, I peered into the inky void and realised -- I couldn't think up a new sig.
For starters, nothing modern has battery life anything like the Palm III used to have, especially not on anything capable of running Linux acceptibly.
Second, you're not going to get anything with a significant nifty factor for under $150. You could get one of the lower end Zires from Palm, or stretch your budget some and get a Tungsten|E, or you could find something used and hopefully not too beat-up from someone else -- and that's about it.
For $150 it would be tough. You could go for an older device like the iPAQ 3670 which there used to be a distro of linux for but you would probably have to get one used.
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. htm. Sadly the Linux choice won't help you much.
Of course the PalmOne Zire, Zire 21, and Zire 31 are all under $150. None of dual expansions though (only the 31 has an expansion). More on the Zire 31 here:
http://www.davespda.com/hardware/pda/palmos/devic
Sony also had some options, the SL10 and TJ25...but you only get memory stick as the expansion option which I personally don't think is very viable.
You can try the recommend tool on my site to see specs for all of these: http://www.davespda.com/resources/recommend/index
And here is a another Linux/PDA site you may want to look at: http://www.linuxda.com/
Get one of these instead. Smaller than a PDA. Easy to write C/C++/C# code on. (Slowly) Network connected, for a fairly reasonable fee. Not too expensive if you sign up with a carrier. And you don't have to carry both a PDA and a cellphone. Works as an MP3 and DIVX player too, expandable up to 512MB miniSD (soon 1GB). The SP3i has a nicer joystick, but is a lot more expensive (no carrier lock-in/discount).
Get a Fujitsu Pencentra 100 or 200 Tablet. (i think those are the correct model numbers anyway...) It'll be a bitch to get Linux on there, but it IS doable. It has two PCMCIA slots (you can put in a CF card reader) and takes IrDA. Decent battery life too. It's just huge. HUGE. Definately in your price range though.
Does anyone know what happened to the line of Linux PDA's that Royal was suppose to put out?