[vox-tech] familiar review

[Gabriel Rosa]

On Fri, 15 Mar 2002, nbs wrote:

> Yeah - I heard that Agenda had been adopted/ported for Linux-on-iPAQ,
> at least as an alternative.  Did you need to install FLTK, too, or were
> the binaries statically-linked to it.

Yes, there are the Agenda PIM utilities, plus some other PIM things, most
notably an all-in-one thing called Storm that seems pretty.

The agenda utils install libfltk as a dependency :)

>
> > After the near-full install I still have 1.4mb left on the / partition,
>
> So "/" is flash?  Is it mounted RW or RO?

To add to Geoff's answer, yes, /var is on the ramfs partition.
I suspect that when I get CF, I'll move $HOME and /etc over to CF,
since that's probably what I make the most changes to.

>
>
> > 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,
>
> 64MB CF is only about $50 bucks at Fry's.  You can probably find something
> somewhere cheaper.  Do you have the appropriate sleeve (or whatever) to
> use a CF card?  If not - how much do those run?  I can't imagine it'd
> be much, since it seems like it should just be some kind of pass-thru
> with a different form-factor.

I saw a nice, sleeker-than-compaq's sleeve going for $45.

http://www.the-gadgeteer.com/silverslider-review.html

>
> BTW - Recently, people started pointing out PCMCIA->CF adapters, which
> will allow CF-based PDAs (like Zaurus & iPaq) to use any old PCMCIA card. :)
>

Hrm... I think that would be a bad idea power wise. I'd like to keep my
battery life to a useful length :)

> What MP3 player are you using?  The one that Trolltech wrote for the
> Zaurus is suitable, but it's currently lacking some useful features
> like forward- and backwards- seeking within a song.
>
> It supports MP3, MPEG1/2 and with a plug-in, MPEG4.  There's a MOD
> plugin, but it sounds like it only works on iPaqs running Qtopia.
>
>
> Fortunately, theKompany.com is coming out with a product which will be
> a complete solution for all audio, video and image viewing needs.
> (And has built-in MOD support.)  I'm eagerly awaiting that. :)


I've been using a Python frontend to madplay called Scream. It has playlist,
shoutcast, seeking, mixer, etc support. Unlike the Zaurus, the Ipaq has an
external speaker ;)

>
> Can you rotate the screen while everything is running?  Do all apps.
> rotate?  Under Qtopia, screen-rotation affects the next application(s)
> you launch, so I can have a right-side-up (portrait) terminal, and
> a sideways (landscape) web browser.  (It also supports all 4 degrees of
> rotation.)


Yes, you can rotate while things are running, but everything rotates.
I can see how having multiple orientations could be useful, but it creates
complications for the d-pad (which way is up, etc). The rotate script loads
an alternate xmodmap to change the d-pad (ya, 4 degrees of rotation).

> Eek... Are there tools that'll let you retrain it?  The Agenda originally
> used Xscribble, and then moved to Xmerlin, which was WAY better.
>
> At least with the latter, you could run an application on your desktop
> to teach it your own strokes.
>
> On the Zaurus, the handwriting is /fully/ trainable (ie, you can even
> remove default strokes, rather than just create alternatives), and
> is managed on the device.


Nope, no training, but I happen to like grafitti, so it's not an issue
for me.

>
>
> If Xmerlin is available for iPaq (I'd be surprised if it wasn't), I strongly
> suggest trying it out.  In the meantime, though, I would like to check
> out Xstroke and see how it compares.

Ya, I'm sure I can easily build it if there's no package for it.
I'm pretty happy with Xstroke, but it has some quirks with rxvt where
writing on the terminal window selects instead of drawing, so to do
handwriting on a terminal you need to have some desktop space available.
Doesn't seem to happen on any other app though.

>
> I'm ok with the 32MB in my Zaurus, but that's only because someone came
> out with an entirely SD-card-based ROM, so rather than having 16MB of RAM
> and 16MB of storage (like Sharp's 1.10 ROM), or ~27MB of RAM and ~5MB of
> storage (like their 1.11 alternative), I've got ~32MB of RAM and 64MB of
> storage. :)

16mb of ram seems to be pretty good. It would be neat to hack up a script
to auto-resize the ramfs (ala WinCE), but I suspect that's really a non issue,
specially if I move /var over to cf maybe.


I'll bring it to LUGOD on monday and let you fiddle with it.

-Gabe