Adventures with the Zaurus

Fourth of July weekend, and I'm spending some time getting used to the Zaurus, so it can be more amenable to my means when I later use it as the brains of my little operation.

First a picture:

You can see here the Death Star orbiting the forest Moon of Endor. Er. I mean.

You see the Zaurus, sitting on the ironing board that also serves as my workbench. To the left, out of frame, is a Leatherman and a rotary tool currently being put to work on a wayward Furby. It asked too many questions.

I've been fairly impressed with the Zaurus (henceforth, "Z") from a hardware perspective. It's a nice little machine, fairly zippy, and looks like it could be a pretty decent PDA if I went in for that sort of thing.

The Z's interface

It even has a tiny keyboard!

I had been told that the Z ran Linux, but was initially a little confused by what that meant. I had read about OpenZaurus, and figured that replacing the stock operating system from Sharp would give me features above and beyond my wildest dreams. I played around with it for a bit. While it certainly offered more flexibility, its configuration proved to be a bit esoteric. No stranger to Linux, I could have muscled through this, but when I found out that the easiest way to get Python running on the Z wouldn't work with OpenZaurus, that kind of sealed the deal, and I'm currently running a stock Sharp operating system again.

The biggest feature I would have wanted from OpenZaurus would have been USB networking, so I could access the internet from the Z, but it proved very tricky to get working with my Ubuntu install, and I've given up for the moment.

The next step is seeing how well the accelerometer works with the Z. It looks like there's some hooey involved in getting the serial port to act like a proper serial port, but any research into it is purely academic until I actually have the accelerometer on hand and can test it out.

The Z that I bought actually came with the Sharp serial cable, a rarity, apparently. It's even been modified to allow the keyboard to open while it's attached, which the stock serial cables don't do. But it still blocks the power port when it's plugged in, which may be something I can't live with -- it's hard to say how long this thing will have to operate in the field, but I was planning on having a battery wired to it just in case. If the power is blocked, that's no good. I might end up having to fashion my own serial cable... which means soldering. Yay.

Now let's just hope I don't brick the thing.