Some Linux stuff for October (bad batteries, good Zauri) ======================================================== This September and October at work has been a bit too busy so I have had little time for anything else, Moreover, I have got some flu or something like that. The battery in my MNT Pocket Reform died in mid September. It was not a surprise - the device have had quite high power consumption even when off so the battery had to be charged often. I am not the firs Pocket owner with dead battery. So I now travel just with a phone and a paper notebook or with the big MNT Reform 2. To my surprise, the Reform 2 makes little change in terms of portability but a big change in productivity, It seems that the big screen (12.5 vs 8) and keyboard with normally sized keys are important. The bigger machine occupies almost all the desk space in trains but can be placed more comfortably than the small one, This also helps a lot. Battery life (4 hours) is not a problem as the Pocket with its more effective battery was only marginally better. For situations when I do not take a laptop I have undusted my Dell Bluetooth keyboard, My Fairphone 5 works well with it. Only the integrated PDA stand is smaller than such large device needs. Now the real stuff. When searching for the keyboard I have opened the box with PDAs. So, just for fun, I inserted new batteries to one of the Agenda VR3 and played with it a bit. I should write a little more about this interesting but not very successful machine. I also decided to try the SHARP Zaurus. There are several Zauri machines available to me. I have only the Linux-based Zaurus machines (older ones used ditterent software environments). I do have a SL5500 (a "classic" PDA format but with a tiny keyboard), a SL6000 model (the only Zaurus which is not second-hand one) and some clamshell machines. Actually I (less or more) use the SL-C3200 model or at least I'm keeping it charged. The SL-C3200 is the latest model with enlarged battery and with a mini-HDD (yes, an actually spinning hard disk!) so it is also the bulkiest and heaviest model available. In reality it is a small notebook with actual keyboard and with a CompacFlash and a SD ports and even with the miniUSB. That is, one can use CF cards for WiFi, Ethernet or Bluetooth. If one has the right adapter then USB flash disks up to 16GB with VFAT system (I think) can be connected and used. The Ethernet and the USB is what I actually use sometimes. So I have decided to try the older SL-C750 (one of the oldest, if not the oldest, clamshell Zaurus). It's not the most capable one (RAM is 64MB, internal storage 256MB, the ARM CPU is about 200MHz) but it is reasonably thin and light. The screen is identical on all clamshell models and has 640x480 resolution (way better than the first iPhones which only arrived years after this). My machine had several previous owners and has its quirks - no sound (it's not a software issue, something is wrong with hardware - it was cheap because of this issue) and has scratches and traces of wear. Anyway, it works well and the keyboard is perfect (if only a 80s calculator-style keyboard can be called "perfect"). For now, I reviewed the software installed here. A basic QTOPIA PDA environment - a program launcher integrated with one-panel file manager (not all file associations work and this is hard to change), a calendar, a todo, a calculator, a music player (useless without sound...) and some other basic stuff (the Opera and the Netfront, an image viewer, a video player...). I have here also the Konsole and the Gnuplot with QTOPIA plotting terminal I don't have the Vim here (only the "vi" buildin) but 9 from 9 Zaurus users preffer the ZEditor so I use it, too. Plus apps like GUI units converter (ZUnit), the QPdf (for older PDF files) and the FBreader for e-books. I forgot about the Hancom Office - a (Korean, I think) office suite for PDA devices. It is simple but mostly compatible with the DOC/XLS/PPT formats of their era (early 2000s) and can help a lot if one does these things. Among others, their word processor can process Asian characters (simpler text editors, even the ZEedit, cannot work with them). The spreadsheet doesn't do graphs but as a spreadsheet if is quite capable. I am able (after some magic with mounting of loopback devices) to have a working GCC (and other tools but no GUI libraries) and the LaTeX (old versions from late 2000s). All these things are SLOW but can help to do some things. Then, I decided to revive the SL6000, too. Why? It is very different device. While it is also the Zaurus (even the screen and its resolution is the same) it has the "traditional" PDF format and can be held in one hand. It is huge for its time (my Fairphone is thinner but still slightly bigger in other dimension) and has a small keyboard under the sliding cover in the lower part of device. The PDA format makes it more practical to pen writing. I'm trying to learn Japanese and Zaurus is device made in Japan so even the English version of the OS has good support for input of weird characters (support in apps is not that great). So if I see a strange Kanji character I'm able to write what I see to the screen and with use the help of software (Kanji recognition is not that simple) identify what it is, even offline. I should install some kind of dictionary to make this fully work as the English OS has no dictionary. The input system can recognise the Kanji but there is no dictionary to translate it at the moment. Still, the SL6000 is also nice for reading (do I noticed that the FBreader works with Asian character correctly?) as the LCD can be used with backlight off (during dailight, for example). There is even a special button for that! Very nice! Actually, I wrote half of this text on the SL6000 (and not the clamshell SL-C750 which has much bigger keyboard) because of its nice display. Well, then I started to cheat and edited the text and wrote she second half on my desktop (the Blacbird with the Linux) because editing in the Vim (and with a huge screen) is faster.