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Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 Today?
TheAdmin writes "A few years ago the first Linux-based Zaurus, the SL-5500, was released for some $600 by Sharp. Today, it only costs $140 in some places online. This article at TuxTops reviews the 5500 from the point of view of trying to figure out how this model fares against today's PDAs and if it's still a good purchase after all these years, especially at this low price. And so I bought one recently because I needed a full-fledged pocket Linux at my workplace where I work as an admin. I just added a $30 Linksys WCF12 WiFi card (works out of the box after upgrading the SL-5500 ROM to version 3.10) which I use with SSH and by utilizing Zaurus' thumb-board. Works great and it's much more portable than a laptop, especially when all you need is some email and SSH on the go."
Unlike the more popular x86 platforms, this has never been the object of upgrades ;( I would love to hear about what new stuff could be done, to revive my basement-forgotten Zaurusl. Last QT-based upgrade I had done totally killed it, in regards to functionality ...
== With enough Will Power, one could move mountains. With enough Brains, one would just leave them where they are ==
How great and modular these systems are...I've done "Linux mods" on everything I could from X-Boxen to PDA's and they always turn out for the better. I have to wonder why, besides the obvious pressure from microsoft to be "standard", more companies haven't switched to linux for mobile and embedded systems. I mean besides the obvious legal juggernaut SCO leaning over their shoulders. ;)
Marky Mark Killed Jason Bourne!
I wrote some VoIP with pretty pictures stuff for the Zaurus (and the Ipod) last year. I think we used an SL-6500 though.
It's a PDA but I left it plugged in at my office - and sshed to it from home and used X11 forwarding to do GUI development on it from home (it was a python GUI but the libraries were sufficiently different to mean running it on the linux desktop machine wasn't close enough).
It seemed like a good idea at the time...
I even compiled some stuff on it, when I couldn't be bothered jumping through the hoops required to cross compile a python library. Compiling on the little Zaurus while you use your P4 desktop to read email is a strange allocation of resources.
I just got my SL-5500 a week or two ago and I've had a lot of fun with it. I flashed it with OpenZaurus and bought a SD card and a Linksys CF Wifi card (WCF12) for it. I wanted to put the newest packages on it, but the package manager refused to install to my SD card. After some research, I stumbled upon the Hentges ROM. After installing that, I tried out CardFS. CardFS is a default install containing a lot of very useful programs. It's designed for people with extra storage space on their CF/SD card. It made everything much simpler. Check out the screenshots for it.
Some of the things I've done with it recently:
- Connected to my desktop via VNC
- Used GAIM at work while all of our machines were down because we were moving offices
- Used it to ssh to my machine to monitor my X10 logs while outside of the house to see the range of the X10 motion sensors