A Quick Review: OpenZaurus

I wanted to stick with OpenZaurus. I really did. Unfortunately I may be going back to the orginal Sharp ROM for my Zaurus SL-5500 handheld.

There’s a lot to like about OpenZaurus. The issues I had with version 3.5.1 were resolved in 3.5.2, and the Opie interface was simple and clean. I like having the brightness control available as a button on the taskbar, and the ability to change the orientation of the display is very cool. I had no trouble getting onto my home wireless network, and the tabs and settings are very well organized. It’s also nice to have the flexibility of choosing from a selection of ROM image sizes to save space on the onboard memory.

The first drawback, however, is there’s not a lot of software preinstalled. It reminded me of my old Palm m505, which had nothing but the basic PIM applications out of the box. As such, expect to do some downloading and installing before you really get to work.

This is where things get a little dicey. I wanted two apps for starters: a browser and a music player. Konquerer Embedded sounded like the way to go, but in an instant I found myself in dependency heck. OpenZaurus has a cool package manager that pulls package lists from feeds for ease of download, installation and removal, but I needed to add a feed to get a certain library, force a dependency, and then endure two package manager crashes before I actually got the browser working. For music players, I tried both the OpiePlayer and an XMMS package, but neither actually played the music — I got a lot of choppy garbage instead. I also had to install dependency software in the correct order or the installer puked.

Just to get that far, I had to surf through some help sites. Documentation for OpenZaurus is still lacking, but hopefully that will change soon. The package manager is nice, but there’s no progress bar to show whether it’s working or not, and given the time it took some of the processes to do their thing, I kept thinking it crashed. It also did not show some packages as installed, despite the fact that I had installed them.

The above entailed a few hours of tinkering, surfing, and starting over with fresh ROM installs before I finally gave up. A lot of the above has plagued a number of us on Linux systems, particularly early on, but my handheld is one thing I’d like to Just Work. I keep passwords (encrypted by ZSafe) and work addresses on it, so I need to keep have it running. It’s also not going to do me much good as an MP3 player if the music won’t play correctly (which it did fine under the Zaurus ROM).

In short, I’ll probably go back to the Sharp ROM for the time being, just because I need to be spending my time on other projects rather than tinkering with my handheld. Konqueror Embedded is working, so I may take one more crack at the music issue before giving up altogether. Otherwise I’ll just keep an eye on OZ for future releases that may carry more improvements.