Zaurus even ignored by the Linux community?

From: Martin Henne (NOREPLYmartin.henne_at_web.de)
Date: 03/08/04 

Date: Mon, 08 Mar 2004 21:39:38 +0100

Hi all,

as a long term linux fan, I needed a good PDA to replace
my old but reliable Palm Pilot Professional. I decided
to buy a zaurus.

1. First disappointment - Time Tracking:

There was no decent time tracking application available,
that fits my needs (gnotime/karm). Timesleuth was no
option, because it's much worse than the one I used
with my palm. Brilliant linux applications have never
been ported. I could compile them for the zaurus, but
they usually dont fit small display sizes. I wrote my
own application -> took me 80 hours sparetime.

2. Second disappointment - Syncing:

There are several scripts to get the zaurus synced with
parts of KDE. But the KDE people itself don't provide
a solution, that integrates smoothly and reliable.
Kitchensync happens to crash, is abandoned and the
website is outdated since more than a year. Even the
new PIM framework Kontact of KDE 3.2 is not able to
sync with the zaurus. If it is, the documentation
(not worth reading) doesn't mention it. btw: it's at
least unloving, like most KDE documentations.
I had to use and modify handcrafted scripts and
write some little tools, that only do the basic work.
Took me 3 days so far, more to expect.

(btw: I'm making a website and put them and my time
tracker online in april '04)

It's not that I want to abuse those brave hackers who work
on several projects concerning the linux desktop. I also
do not want to flame about the community, as I consider
myself as a part of it.

But why do we all (we programmers at the linux community)
miss the change to establish Linux on PDAs and to work
with those PDAs?

Sharp failed arkwardly to provide decent applications
for their Zaurus. Brave programmers jumped in and wrote
OpenZaurus. But it never became stable, no matter what
the version says. I'm still looking forward to a version,
that can be used in productive environments (Maybe Open
Embedded).

The community provided working software for the palm
OS, for which we had to learn a new API and on which we
were mostly limited to C. On Qtopia-based devices we
have Qt and it's handy designer and all datafiles are
(where) provided as XML (before sharp decided to
change the format on newer roms - but we still can
hope for Open Embedded).

KOrganzer for the Zaurus is also no option. It's unfinished,
and it has not been downscaled to the memory- screen- and
CPU- conditions on a PDA.

I know that no one can expect, that KDE developers spend
even more time to get the Qtopia PDAs supported by the
Linux desktop. But since the iPaq and the Zaurus are
available, a lot of coding has been done to the PIM
applications. I just have that suspicion, that the those
PDAs have deserved a higher priority than other PDAs
because they run linux.

Do we give away a great possibility here?

Martin 

-- 
martin.henne <at> web.de