[AuckLUG] Linux PDA

[Paul Eggleton]

On Fri, 03 Aug 2007, Fuad Tabba wrote:
> There has been some talk lately about Linux laptops. Was wondering if
> anyone has had any experiences (good or bad) with Linux PDAs, subnotebooks,
> or tablets.

Well, I am a developer on the Opie project, and I'm a long-time user of 
several Linux distributions for handhelds including Familiar and Angstrom. I 
have several PDAs here for development and testing, most of them are HP iPAQs 
(h3850, h3970, h2200) all of which are running Linux.

One of the problems with getting Linux to work on different handheld devices 
is that almost all of them are different internally, which means supporting 
each new device in the kernel is a whole project in itself. This means that 
some PDA models are better supported under Linux than others. Of the iPAQs, 
if I was to recommend a model right now I'd say go for a second hand h2200 or 
possibly an hx4700. You will also get a fair bit of mileage out of the older 
models eg. the h3800 and h3900 series, but unfortunately they are currently 
stuck with a pretty much unmaintained 2.4 kernel, which means no bugfixes for 
driver issues at least in the short to medium term.

Of course I'm biased, but I believe Opie provides a very usable environment 
for PDAs. There are some areas that need work, notably a modern web browser 
and PIM syncing, however there are efforts going on right now to address 
those two shortcomings based around Konqueror Embedded and OpenSync 
respectively. A new version of Opie (1.2.3) was released just a week ago, and 
I hope it will soon be making its way into handheld Linux distributions so 
that users can easily get hold of it.

I also have an FIC Neo1973 phone here ostensibly for development purposes, 
although I have not contributed any code to OpenMoko yet. Just in case you 
were wondering, the OpenMoko platform is nowhere near ready for users at the 
moment, but that should improve over the coming months since it is now at 
least available for purchase to interested developers.

If anyone has any specific questions on handheld Linux I'd be happy to answer 
them.

Cheers,
Paul