After all the trouble related to OZ's installer, I was pretty sure pdaXrom could definitely not be worse,. so I gave it a try. Installation procedure is same as for Cacko and worked well (yes, that is including resizing root partition).
Boots in landscape mode and displays text console login. Login works as root with blank password. startx works as expected. Asks for screen calibration. Try my best, however the result is terrible. Exit. rm /etc/pointercal (from FAQ and my Vr3 experience), startx. Better. Screen rotation works. I got X on Z. I'm as happy as a penguin can be.
The taskbar is not as nice as Cacko/qtopia. The applets are simpler. Everything seems desgined for landscape mode (or not desgined for a PDA at all). I bought a clamshell because that exactly what I wanted, a tiny laptop, but for showing off PDA style is better. The X server seems to take quite some to "decide" what orientation to display. That's a little bit annoying when powering on. The only input method is keyboard and virutal keyboard, from a PDA I'd expect some form of character recognition. Finally, I'd prefer a simpler window manager as default (one app at a time, fullscreen).
CF memory card ejected (clicking on the cards popup menu is unmount/eject) and WLAN CF inserted. Card blinks. GUI shows no reaction, but a what surprise, according to dmesg the hostap_cs driver got loaded. The cards menu calls my ADTEC card (vendor said equivilant to a SMC) "Zcomac XI-325H 200mW". (Oops 200mW, doesn't sound like a lot of mobility but I was aware of that when buying, was the cheapest.). Menu / System Tools / LAN&Wifi looks like it would be easy to setup if I had a AP nearby. iwconfig and so on are present.
Now it comes to heavy testing for stability, usability and additional software, of course. I chose 50MB for the root fs as recommended, this leaves 71MB for /dev/mtdblock/3 mounted as /home and /mnt/usr according to df and mount (both rw), but /mnt/user is mount --bind /home/user...
Anyway seventy megs to be used, I need usbnet/IPMASQ again. usbnet works out of the box. The Z thinks he's 192.168.129.201, I'll accept this for now (can be changed in Menu / System Tools / USB). Setup my desktop box (describe this later), set passwd for root on zaurus and ssh works. Tried dillo and liked it, but you can't do without horizontal scrolling in portrait mode. The default font is too small. (I can read it, I have good eyes, but I think they'll worsen if I continue with this setup.) BTW: pdaXrom.org is the only site I've checked which didn't look good. Dillo has the tendency or ruining table layouts.
Menu / System Tools / Package Manager. Configured the "official" feed. The list of availabe packages is impressive, the manager is intuitive. This time I'm not going to make the same mistake I made with Cacko (installed *everything* which looked interesting), I gotta to make some choice. Productivity is not on the aganda, I need something to play with: Firefox, gaim, gimp, gnumeric, gpe-calc, gtodo, kdepim, kopi, minimo, nmap, octave, yacas. (I hope this will all fit on my 69MB free space. BTW: I miss emacs, of course, and a SIP (VoIP) tool.) top tells my Z is heavily wgetting. There's no progress bar, but df -h is a good hint. Available space is 0 now, still nothing happens. Commands start failing (as displayed in tab Log), I want to stop it and retry with a smaller set of applications, unplug the cable, kill the package manager: Free Space 23MB now. Same apps as before. Restart X. Magic.
Firefox: OK. This was important to prove, but it's slow. GAIM: Maybe the most important toy for me ATM; works. Stylepheed: Well, it works (IMAP/SSL, SMTP/STARTTSL/AUTH), but its UI seems to big (for me), I'm a mutt fan.
summary: Ok, it works with X and firefox and everything, that's impressive for the linux enthusiast or the one who really wants to squeeze his desktop into his pocket. For everyday use the GUI needs work. You can argue about portrait or landscape, fullscreen versus windows, but in any case windows must fit on the screen! I hate to use stylus and keyboard at the same time, input should be improved. When playing around with the WLAN applet X sometimes crashes.
©Jan Korger, spacezone.de