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TalkBack
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| Re: Linux carves a niche in PDA market |
Name:
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Glenn Lovitz
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Posted At:
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14:08 GMT 06/13/2002
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It's a great littel PDA I got for my son for high school graduation. Even better for connectivity is running it out through a proxy server on my Win98 box to which it is docked (later Wins may be able to use ICS). I get broadband access through my home network and can surf to Zaurus program download sites (e.g. http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/) with Opera as a full size, Java enabled browser and download programs directly to a CF card. To do it all with a full size keyboard and mouse capability use the FB VNC Server (free and open source) to run the Zaurus from your PC via remote control! Want more, load Samba server and access your Zaurus storage devices (rom and card) from windows explorer on your PC. Load smbmount and access your PC drives (must be shared) directly on your Zaurus. This may be entering the Geek domain a bit far for most users but it really is not very hard to do.
If you are a Geek, you have to love the ability to get to Linux directly with a bash shell. I'm a Solaris sysadmin and found lots of commandds work in either Sys V or BSD varients. While this is not for a casual user or *nix uninitiated it gives tremendous flexibilty. For example, when a hiccup on the Win89 box messed up my connection through the USB dock, I quickly re-established it by finding the process-id of the inetd process and issuing a kill -HUP pid# command. No PocketPC shutdown, reboot and no need to get out of multiple running apps. An added bonus is my 18 year old son sitting wide-eyed in awe of the old man -- doesn't happen much at that age! Now he wants to learn Linux.
The list of availalble apps, both free and commercial is already growing at an impressive rate. I've never been a big PDA fan, but after playing with this one I'll probably have to go out and buy myself one soon.
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