Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 Instruction Manual page 165

my Zaurus SL-C3000 and SL-C3100
Games
pdaXrom is the king in games. Not only can it support many games through emulators, but there
are also a lot of user contributed games of all sorts. Even a playstation emulator has been ported
and optimised for pdaXrom.
Language
The default language of both pdaXrom and OZ is English. Support for other languages is provided
via way of unicode fonts and input method support for entering extended characters using a virtual
keyboard. OZ supports a host of European languages, but lacks support for Asian languages such as
CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean). pdaXrom has support for CJK, although not all applications have
been compiled with CJK support enabled.
Development
Now this is the biggest difference between pdaXrom and OZ. OZ uses a build system called OE
(OpenEmbedded) which is used to build everything in OZ. OE only runs on Linux and can target
various platforms of which the Zaurus is one, but you will need a PC to build OZ packages and
compile code. The native compiler which can compile code directly on the Zaurus itself is not very
well supported on OZ. pdaXrom in contrast is more geared towards the Zaurus. It has a pre-made
and configured development image that can be placed onto the Zaurus which allows you to
immediately begin building and compiling. There are also bootable ISO images and VMWare images
of pdaXrom for the PC, so you can easily run pdaXrom on your PC as well, or use the ready build
image to cross compile applications for the Zaurus. OZ developers are also concentrating more on
developing PDA specific applications that works on other devices besides the Zaurus, ie they target
devices with smaller screens and less storage. pdaXrom on the other hand is more about getting as
many PC linux apps working on the Zaurus as possible and exploiting and utilising every possible
feature that the Zaurus has. In essence, pdaXrom is about turning the Zaurus into a mini linux PC,
whereas OZ is more about providing a bleeding edge and alternate open source operating system,
as well as lightweight applications for PDAs.
Support and Community
The OZ community is divided into two distinct groups, the developers and the end users. OZ
developer prefer to communicate through their mailing list which is very development centric and
offer support on IRC for users. They also announce things through their website and through posts
on OESF. Documentation was almost non existant or scattered until recently. The new OZ wiki is a
start for documenting a few things, but bug reporting is still quite confusing and tedious since there
are several bug reporting systems and repositories.
pdaXrom has a much smaller development team than OZ but has a bigger user community (OZ has
more users, but no cohesive user community). Support for pdaXrom is pretty much community
driven. The pdaXrom users help each other and collect workarounds for common problems until
they are fixed. Bug reporting is much easier and simpler in pdaXrom, but the versioning scheme of
pdaXrom is quite confusing since it does not adhere to a standard.
Custom C3000 distro
Since neither pdaXrom nor OpenZaurus have sufficient features that would make them the distro of
choice on a C3000, I have come to the conclusion that I would need to build my own custom distro
for my C3000. This custom distro would be based on either pdaXrom or OpenZaurus.
pdaXrom development has stopped for the relatively stable and functional 2.4 kernel based beta1
and beta3. All current development is on the 2.6 kernel based beta4 and r121.
OpenZaurus is divided into OPIE and GPE. OPIE seems abandoned and does not offer much more
than Cacko/Sharp in terms of functionality since it lacks major applications and is not backwards
compatible with existing non-opensource applications. GPE seems unfinished and looks rather plain.
One option would be to continue work on pdaXrom beta3 and enhance its stability. The other option
would be to enhance the Hentges OZ/GPE image. For the time being, I will refer to the stable
pdaXrom beta1/beta3 based distro as pdaXii13 (pdaXrom improved and integrated beta1 and
beta3) and the OpenZaurus based distro as OZii31 (OpenZaurus improved and internationalized
3.5.4.1).
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http://www.users.on.net/~hluc/myzaurus/
16/09/2007 12:23