the problem is the zaurus community has, at best, stagnated, at worst is dying.
although Sharp still make small batches of new machines (despite saying 1y9m ago they'd ceased production), there's not many sold - more change hands on ebay. the community at www.oesf.org is still solid, and tyrannozaurus still runs his web site. problem is that the key advantages the Z had - compact shape, SD + CF + IRDA + microdrive + VGA + touch screen have been gradually overtaken by rivals. Sure, the N810 doesn't have a CF slot, and not a full-size memory slot, but is has less need of one since it has bluetooth, wifi and gps built in. when we buy computer equipment, we know it will become obsolete one day. The Z has plenty of life left in it due to its versatility, but we have to hope someone with skill, passion *and* time will work on it. Angstrom was a great start, and has provided some great building-blocks - the kernel for example has been successfully used for Debian. Problem is, it wanted to be ubuiquitous (all things to all people and devices) and there's neither the developer time, funding for hardware, or passion for the Zaurus. Personally, I have a C3100 and I still use it as a great hacking tool (kismet, nmap etc) because its keyboard makes such things possible. When I first had the Z, I ran cacko, and I used it a lot more because qtopia made it more appliance and less hacking tool. I'm currently running Debian, so I can hack around with tomtom-on-zaurus, and also from time to time, play with Android. When I want to do things like browse web, read RSS and watch a movie, I tend to use my Nokia 800 because it's more appliance-like, but I never do any scripting on it, and haven't even jumped through the hoops to get kismet up! This may all change when the n810's successor comes out, or wimax comes to the UK and I'd get an N810w, or maybe some money comes my way and I buy the Raon Everun Note instead... there's nothing compelling enough to make me want to scrape the money together to buy anything new, I seem to have plateaud (sp?) in technical nirvana at the moment!! _______________________________________________ Angstrom-distro-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linuxtogo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/angstrom-distro-users
