[vox-tech] Hackin' the Zaurus

[Bill Kendrick]

On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 04:04:59PM -0700, Nicole TWN wrote:
> Hi gang, Nicole here in the third or fourth circle of Hell, AKA Los Angeles.
> 

Hard to tell which circle cuz of the smog, huh? ;)


> My favorite geek toy, my beloved Zaurus 5500, recently inspired one of the
> interns to get one for his very own.  He opted for the even shinier 5600, 
> and has recently made a shocking discovery:  Sharp has changed their synching
> mechanism from XML- and TCP-based to some proprietary format and protocol,
> not only for the 5600 but also for the latest 5500 ROM.

Not _exactly_ proprietary data format.  The DaTa Manager (DTM) stuff is
documented at Sharp's site:

  http://community.zaurus.com/projects/dtm/


> Works under Windows, of course, but they aren't doing jack for the
> open source community.

Well, they're doing a LITTLE jack for us. ;^)

But yeah.  Sadly, the biggest market out there is Windows users,
so they have to cater to them, first. :^(


> Well.  THIS cannot be allowed to stand.  Andrew (said intern) is launching 
> a project to reverse-engineer the synching protocol and restore the ability
> to sync natively in Linux.

Make sure he looks at the URL above before going TOO nuts. ;^)
It'll, at the very least, help.


You guys may also want to consider OpenZaurus as an alternative to the
Sharp stuff.

  http://www.openzaurus.org/


> All work is (and will be) GPL'd.  If you're interested, check out his
> website at www.cyph.org or drop him a note at cyphactor at socal dot rr dot 
> com.
> 
> Life is good at work.  I have a whole lab of machines to play with.

Cool. :)

-bill!