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?"

Comments

Zaurus SL-5500

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Zaurus SL-5500

[Trelane]

3 or 4 hours of use, a couple of days on standby, tops. Less with WiFi.

Well, that's with the 2.x series Sharp ROMs. If you upgrade to the 3.1x ROM from Sharp (which brings it, from what I understand, to be about in-line with the SL-5600, it does nice things like turning off any cards when they're not being used, and battery life becomes quite nice (I've gone for a week or more with one charge, not using wi-fi). Additionally, the new MP3 player in the 3.10 ROM can turn off the screen; I've gotten a solid 8 hours of continuous MP3 playing time. Unfortunately, last I used it, The Kompany's OGG player does not turn off the screen, and is limited to 4-6 hours.

All that said, I've (in November) bought a PalmOne Tungsten T5, since it has builtin bluetooth (no WiFi, though. :() the DriveMode, and Linux syncs quite well with it and a few common apps. While I could never get my Zaurus to sync with Linux in the sharp 2.x ROM series, the 3.x ROMs out and out don't support Linux, and the protocol used is (yet) unknown. This, coupled with Sharp's withdrawal from the US market, caused my switch back to Palm. By no mistake, I still have my Zaurus as my sidekick, since it is truly a mobile computer (for instance, Calculon comes in quite handy in physics), and the OpenZaurus ROMs are quite impressive (though they definitely have lackings yet, esp. wrt. power management).

Re:Zaurus SL-5500

[Jahf]

It really doesn't make that big of a difference for mine.

I've used the old Sharp ROM, Sharp 3.x, and OpenZaurus of many flavors and none of them every gets -more- than 2 hours with WiFi or 4 hours without.

Add on to that that you won't find a 5500 with a battery that is less than 18 months old unless you buy a replacement battery and he would probably get significantly less than that.

If he needs double-digit hours there is not a 5500 in the world that will come to even 50% of what he needs.

And using OpenZaurus with MultiSync -does- allow Linux support. MultiSync replaces the (crappy) trolltech desktop app for Sync and also syncs to Evolution ... making an nice solution with some fiddling.

Me? I gave up on PDAs completely, but I work from home and only travel a bit.

linuxdevices.com

[tchuladdiass]

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).

Zaurus on ebay

[descendent]

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.

No

[md81544]

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.

iPaq h3800 series on eBay!

[Paul d'Aoust]

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:

• Opie which is based off TrollTech's Qtopia (which I think is the enviro used in the Zaurus handheld). I can't comment on it much because I haven't been paying attention to its development.
• GPE, which I'm more interested in, because it uses lots of freedesktop.org standards like HAL, DBUS, gstreamer, etc, and I'm a GNOME fan myself. The website is pretty spare, but if you search the mailing lists, you realise there's a lot more going on than meets the eye.

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?)