[vox-tech] familiar review

[Gabriel Rosa]

hey all,

so I got my ipaq 2 days ago (a gift from Marianne) and after a night of
not sleeping, and a day of being extremely impressed with Familiar 0.5.1, I
thought I'd share a bit.

First of all, getting Familiar installed on the Ipaq was a piece of cake.
I followed the instructions on the familiar website:

first (under "PocketPC") I set the Ipaq up for "dialup", ie. ppp to my
desktop over serial. Then using PocketExplorer I downloaded BootBlaster
and a free FTP client called ScottyFTP, and backed up my boot sector and
wince partition, then transfered those over to the desktop.

Then I downloaded the bootldr and flashed the boot sector using bootblaster.
Reboot time. Hold down the d-pad and hit the reset switch, and up came
a nice Tux image and a bootloader picture.

Since the Ipaq was still in the cradle I opened up minicom, and set up a
serial connection to it, and was greeted by the boot loader command line.

Wipe the wince partition, and type 'load root' to load the root image I had
downloaded from the familiar page, and then used minicom to upload the image
with xmodem. It wrote the image to flash and then I typed 'boot', and it
booted the image.

An X stippled pattern came up on the ipaq after boot messages on the serial
console, and a login prompt on serial.

So I logged in, and started ppp, then closed minicom, and started up ppp on
the desktop. After that, I was able to ssh into the ipaq! :)

>From there, I used the dpkg'esque ipkg system to download 'task-complete' and
'task-mp3-play', the pseudo packages with most of the packages I wanted.

The boring part came then, as I waited for the packages to install over
115200 serial. After that, I had a fully working, Linux installed handheld :)

I didn't like the default install very much, so I went ahead and ditched the
window manager (ios) and installed icewm. I also went thru the graphical
package manager (very excellent) and installed vim and bash (essentials) and
a lot of PIM stuff (lots of options, some taken from agenda IIRC), dillo
and some small utilities.

Everything works really nicely, the anti-aliased fonts look _nice_. And I mean
_nice_ :)

After the near-full install I still have 1.4mb left on the / partition, and
half of the 32mb of ram mounted as a ramfs. As soon as I get the cha$$$nce,
I'll probably get a nice 64/128 CF card to go with it, so I can carry some
tunes around. It'll probably make a nice MP3 player, since you can shut the
screen off completely, although not as nice as the Clie with dedicated DSP.

One of the things that really impressed me is how easily the screen rotates
from landscape to portrait (both directions each), and how the hardware
(screen, audio, apm, launch buttons) worked out of the box.

It also comes with an onscreen keyboard and xstroke, for handwriting. xstroke
seems to understand my grafitti characters, so I'm assuming the default config
is grafitti (there's a .conf in /etc you can change with character mappings).

Suposedly familiar is binary and library compatible with the debian arm
packages, but I still need to try that out.

Overall I have to say this rocks. Being a geek I wouldn't mind having a newer
model with more storage (I think the newer ones have 64mb flash/64mb ram, or
64mb flash/32mb ram, or similar), but 16mb seems to be more than enough for a
good config.

Anyways, off to play with the familiar :)

-Gabe