So a friend of mine (I would link to him, but his home page seems to just say ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ so I guess you shouldn’t) lent me (semi-permanent loan, really) an old Sharp Zaurus.
Having been a Palm guy for a while, I knew it was not going to be anywhere near as pleasant to use as a Palm. And, for the most part, it isn’t.
However, it’s really a great piece of hardware, and I enjoy it a lot. It’s a little teeny Linux box. I went and started customizing crap, and I have tried out several different ROMs and all kinds of stuff. Memo to anyone using one of these things: Openzaurus Opie – Hentges ROM – is very very nice. That on a 128MB SD Card is actually very pleasant. And the device is ridiculously easy to re-flash. Reinstalling things on my Treo took FOREVER – this thing is flashed and up 5 or 6 times before I would’ve flashed my Treo even once.
I’m still trying to get it all tweaked and configured and everything the way I want it (mind you, this is a daunting task – I’ve had this thing for weeks now and am still trying to get it the way I want it.) Once I do I will probably make sure to take a snapshot of the disk image. I think I found a bug in Hentges’ AltBoot boot loader thingee – if so I guess I should toss the guy a patch.
So I managed to get Ruby on there – so I can continue to mess around with that – and I’ve installed thttpd – which has CGI support – which is really all I need. I don’t need mod_ruby or any such weirdeosity for development purposes.
The big ugly scary thing that I want to try to get on there is Sleepycat’s XMLDB. It’s a thing that lets you just jam XML into a database and index it up and search it and find it and stuff. Which is interesting for some stuff I’ve been thinking about. Although I still feel like the Flying Dutchman – forever doomed to recreate the same piece of software over and over again.
My desire to find a Fun Project to occupy me shall occupy, perhaps, another Blog posting later on…