This is not website, nor an article. This is where a dump what I've been doing while my new toy is rebooting, flashing or downloading. The Z is reasonably fast, so this page is pretty simple, probably the simplest 2006 web site in the world. I love pushing things to its superlatives. Let's call it optimized for Zaurus, if your screen's to big, go and get a smaller one.
I owned a VR3, the first linux PDA, before and loved it for its flexibility. Of course, I'd fancy a Zaurus, but it was low on my agenda. To be honest, I don't need a PDA and they are pretty expensive for a poor student. But then, things changed rapidly. My friend wanted a mobile Internet device and he was considering buying a Windoze Smartphone like those Taiwanese HTCs as known as "?da" in Europe. That's a challenge as that could have been the final battle in our personal holy war. (OK, I want to convince my dad, too, of the power of the penguin, but he's a lost soul. The only gadget he'd really accept was one either running Newton or VMS. Unless someone builds this he's stuck with M$ products, he hates and continues to use anyway.)
So I made some research as documented in my links and finally got a used SL-C860 via linuxontour.de and ebay. (My favourite dealer temporarily stop selling Zaurii because of legal trouble with his more expensive competitor.) It's in very good shape and came with 256MB CF, Z remote control headphones, two USB cables and leather bag for 350 EUR. I found this was cheap (and only changed my mind when I learned that new N770 sell at the same price). The only trouble was finding a suitable escrow service, in the end we used paypal. Quickly bought a cheap Prism2.5 Wifi CF card which is known to draw a lot of power from the Z but it doesn't bother me much as my university's stupid closed source clients only policy prevents me from really using it. (My friends uni allows vpnc; good for me, he'll think linux is great.) The two things left to buy is a power source – I'm thinking about a solar powered battery pack (that's cool and cheaper as Sharp's original European power supply) – and a headset for VoIP.
Got it with Cacko1.22 on it. First thing to do was upgrade to 1.23 full and play around with kismet and wellenreiter II. (All WLANs in my neighbourhood use WEP. Fuck, I thought all private wireless APs were open for the owners were either ignorant about security or would advocate open access for their own comfort when away from home.) Worked quite well, rokugo's translations helped with Japanese menus. Decided quickly I wouldn't like cacko full for all the software (mostly Sharp PIM) installed by default is worse than it's open source replacements such as OPIE. The 860 has sufficient flash to support both Sharp and OPIE at the same time but menus get really big. I hated that Xqt sometimes went Japanese and didn't work in PDA style (portrait) mode. Oh, and I almost screwed things up while trying to secure the installation by disabling sudo. OK, some digital photos are a must nowadays.
The next obstacle was internet access without the help of my ignorant neighbours with their WEP secured WLANs (I didn't want to try my luck with aircrack.), that is usbnet, kind of ethernet over USB. The WIKI documentation seemed outdated and I didn't understand Sharp's Settings/Network applet but standard linux ifconfig/route did the job and I could ssh from PC to the Z. Great. OK, IP masquerading then, shouldn't be to hard on linux 2.6.x but it took me a whole day to find iptables_nat. Some one has hidden it under Device Drivers (I was not going to add hardware to my box, was I?), Networking support (OK, this was an easy guess), Networking options (hmm), Network packet filtering (easy again, netfilter rang a bell), Netfilter Configuration (the only choice here, easy again), connection tracking (this was the hardest one to spot), IP tables support (yeah!), Full NAT (Do I need this? Hint: Yes), MASQUERADE target support (Finally, I'm there.) (JFTR, this is when I started liking the concept of kernel modules. It is my first modularized kernel ever.) The hardest part was finding out /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward was 0 on my debian box.
summary: Cacko is a good distro. I didn't use for more than a couple of days because I wanted more. But -- hey! -- it works out of the box. You get all the standards from Sharp including the popular Opera browser plus a great feed with the most important open source stuff. Yery good to start with, I should have kept it. Only thing, it messes with partitions, which may cause trouble with OZ installtions. (I don't think we can blame Cacko here, because Cacko has a working partitioning tool.) However, I'd recommend Cacko lite for flexibility.
©Jan Korger, spacezone.de