Full X11-Based Distro For PDAs

omin0us writes "over at http://cacko.zaurususergroup.com, we are working on a Full X11 based Linux distro for the Sharp Zaurus SL-c7x0/860 series of PDAs. The screen has a usable full VGA resolution of 640x480 and the distro uses Openbox/ROX Desktop as its Native WM. But others such as Fluxbox, Afterstep, and XFCE have been compiled for it and run nicely. You will also find a WIDE variety of compiled apps in the Feed on the Cacko website such as a native GCC Compiler, XMMS, Mplayer, prboom, Gimp, Gkrellm, Abiword and numerous others. Many different screenshots of it in action may be found here. This is truly bringing desktop linux to the PDA. Also, another project that has branched from Cacko Linux is Gentoo for Zaurus. This project, at the moment is based on the Cacko X11 environment, but will eventually become a full Gentoo environment. "It can emerge packages, sync, or create Gentoo packages using the -B switch in emerge." This should be an interesting project to watch."

Portable Compiler While You're on the Plane.

You will also find a WIDE variety of compiled apps in the Feed on the Cacko website such as a native GCC Compiler

Maybe it's me, but I find it downright hilarious that they include a compiler with a PDA. Like that's some kind of huge geek selling point for it.

Geek 1: Yeah, I got Quake running on my PDA. Take that!
Geek 2: That's nothing! I compiled it on my PDA and *then* played it.

All the other geeks gather around Geek #2. One of the geek chicks who was with Geek #1 pulls away from him and goes over to Geek #2.

Yeah... I guess it's that important. Just like that nifty new 64-bit CPU that makes my penis feel bigger than it actually is. Yippie.

Re:Portable Compiler While You're on the Plane.

I work at a bank, and own a Zaurus SL-C700. I work full-time in a tech support call center (noon to 11 PM), and am a full-time student. This means when it's late at night, I have plenty of time to work on homework.

For the past two semesters, all of my programming assignments have been written, built, and debugged on the SL-C700. I'd say it takes me perhaps twice as long to type in code, and GCC runs rather slowly. But the hours would otherwise be wasted. I'm not allowed to put Linux or GCC on Bank computers.

Portable GCC is indeed useful.

Re:Portable Compiler While You're on the Plane.

...I can do everything in Windows I can do in Linux...

Yeah, I wasn't very good at Linux for a while either. Keep at it tho, you'll get there.

;-)

I am the founder of Cacko

Make a whois :)
Glad but surprised to be Slashdotted :)

Interesting project to watch?

Yeah, watching Gentoo emerge packages on a crappy PXA250 is a whole lot of fun, I'm sure.

Is the Linux desktop really the right metaphor for a palmtop device? Apple knew a desktop was wrong, Microsoft finally figured it out with PPC2002.

When will the good folks working on these Linux ports figure it out?

Re:Interesting project to watch?

Actually, with a keyboard, as this device has, a terminal with all powerful command line tools (bash, ssh, text editor, IS very usable. Ok, being able to use multiple windows (which don't fit together on 640x480) is not very useful, but the mentioned window managers can do a lot more which can be useful to the geek and on a pda (tabs, proper keybindings etc. etc.)

Well... maybe

"This should be an interesting project to watch."

Well, yes, everything but the three-week bootstrap!

Damn,,

after seeing those screenhosts my first 2 geek reactions are

1) Must by gadget to run Linux on
2) Must get a copy of Lemming and run on GnuBoy

Damn you slashdot for spending my money and filling my time.

Rus

Openbox ROX !

Mmmm. Definitely the right combination, although on my desktops I prefer to just have rox-filer running rather than the rox desktop. It's great when the n00bs ask where the start menu is ,-}
There are a couple of openbox/rox-filer desktop screenshots on my site if anyone cares to look - url above.

I gotta get me one of those zaurus thingees..

Noone's said it yet..

Disclaimer: I'm a happy Gentoo user myself ;p

Wonder how long it takes to compile X on a PDA ;)

Although it would work fine with an existing distcc cluster. Now, imagine a beowulf cluster of PDAs compiling Gentoo!

Opie should be mentioned

I know it's a different project, but people who find cacko interesting might find opie interesting as well.

http://opie.handhelds.org/

Integrated WiFi

If it had WiFi built in I'd buy it in a heartbeat. I know I can add it, but at the cost of one memory slot. Thats a heafty price to pay. Very cool stuff though.

Re:Integrated WiFi

The recently released specs for the new 6000 series [zaurususergroup.com] will include an option for built-in wifi, both Bluetooth and 802.11.

What packaging system?

There is a very important point which is glossed over in the article...what type of packaging system will be used in the Zaurus X11 distro? Yes I know that it's based on Gentoo and you can emerge software, but it's not a true package management system, like, say, apt-get.

emerge apt-get!

Cacko?

The site isn't responding so I haven't seen anything explaining the derivation of the name but it seems like an odd choice [reference.com]

If it had a hard drive...

Wouldn't a 4Gb hard disk just like whats in the mini ipod go down a treat in one of these things?

Combine that with wifi (as mentioned by another poster) and at least laptop battery life expectancy and i would instantly order one.

I don't ask much :)

Why not KDE?

What is wrong with KDE? I have used KDE in 640x480 and it can fit quite well in it. KDE has been designed to scale quite well across a variety of machines, and 640x480 is plenty for it.

Coming soon to /.

Updates on the only items that HAVEN'T run linux so far:

- Porting linux to a kitchen blender
- Porting linux to a carrot
- Porting linux to the wart on my grandmothers knee

It used to be a joke...

I remember someone's old sig line:

I run X windows on my wristwatch.

Link to ROX

Would have been nice to include a link to the ROX Desktop [sf.net]...

zaurus-debian

One should mention that there exists a project for porting debian to zaurus already:

http://pocketworkstation.org/

Development seems to have stopped in August 2003 but maybe its worth a try - it even claims to enable running evolution just by apt-getting it...

Mirror!

Enjoy! http://colo.fibersnet.net/x11/cacko.zaurususergrou p.com/screenshots.php?menuid=2 [fibersnet.net]

I went with a Handera 330 instead

I got some cash for xmas, and tried to decide what to get to replace my Palm IIIxe. I know someone with a Zaurus SL-5000 (the original developer model, 32MB RAM) and was seriously tempted to find a real Zaurus off eBay. There were just a couple of problems.

The first is the battery life. I could go weeks on two AAA batteries in the IIIxe, while all these multi-hundred MHz machines have battery lives measured in hours. On an international flight, or when vacationing on the side of a mountain in rural Italy, that makes a difference.

The second is simple efficiency. On the Palm, apps execute in place; there's no need to copy from "storage" to "executable RAM" or anything like that. This frees up a remarkable amount of memory in practice. Linux's support for XIP is still highly experimental, though it seems some progress is being made.

The other part of efficiency is the apps. The Palm apps are really well-designed, and really work for a small-screen, stylus device. A lot of Linux apps don't translate so well to a dinky screen and pen-based operation, and even the specific PIM apps have some rough spots (though I admit I haven't seen the very latest environments).

I finally decided I didn't really need to run a webserver off my PDA (however much I wanted to, yeah I'm a geek), or Quake. I got a Handera 330 [pencomputing.com] off eBay (not easy, some guy had bought the last 11 of them; wtf?). CF and SD slots, 240x320 screen (but grayscale, so battery life doesn't suffer), built-in voice recorder, etc.

It "just works"

I've been using the cacko X11 Rom within a few days of its appearance and it works great - so well that I donated shortly after. In fact, it (by no small measure) works better than the original sharp ROM. If you own one of the newer zaurus models and haven't tried it, i strongly encourage you to do so. The install is painless, and you get a fully functional linux desktop in your pocket.

That's one giant leap backwards...

X is all wrong for devices like this. Qtopia, on the other hand, which is what Sharp was smart enoug to put in them to start with, is a very good fit. This is simply a hacking tour-de-force. Sure, you can do it, and run X on an X-scale PDA, but it's *stupid* to do so. Especially since Qtopia lets you port Qt applications with minimal fuss. I suppose this gives the rabid QT haters somethign to do with their spare time, though, so it's not all bad...

Title is misleading

The title, and even the body of the submitted news are somewhat misleading, in that they imply this is the first time X has been put on a PDA. At handhelds.org, GPE has been running on X for a good long time, and IIRC, even Opie has an X port.

To be fair, though, this is the first time I've ever seen full-out KDE running on a PDA, so this is something new. Definitely, it's an interesting accomplishment that the author should be proud of.

-Erwos

Who on earth came up with the name?

Don't they realise that cack is a euphemism for "shit" or "godawful"? While naming libcaca was quite appropriate in a self-deprecating ironic way, cacko is not a good name for a distribution you want to be taken seriously.

Remote X?

Could this be used as a remote X terminal? I haven't looked into the prices of these things, so it'd probably be cost-prohibitive (or at least cost-a-lot), but it could be really useful to have access to my main machine's desktop as I walk around the office.

But I just got mine!

Does this mean I now have to sell my Zaurus 5600 and buy the 760 to get a decent X11 based distro!!! Doh!

Desktops versus Distros...

Man, you'd think /.'ers could tell the difference betwen a *distribution* and a *desktop environment* Opie is NOT a "distribution" for handhelds, and thus it's NOT comparable to Cacko, Gentoo, or what have you. Opie is JUST a desktop environment; the only thing it's comparable to is QTopia (QT-based), GPE (X11/GTK based), and Pico. Opie is the preferred GUI for the Familiar (iPAQ, familiar.handhelds.org [handhelds.org] ) and OpenZaurus distributions (openzaurus.org [openzaurus.org]), but it's not a distribution by itself, so please stop treating it as such.

They still don't get it

The point of a PDA is a digital assistant. By porting X/gcc/etc to it, you get a nice demonstration of C/C++ portability, but you also end up with (another) underpowered desktop.

The reason for PDAs is not to shrink the desktop to fit in your pocket. They exist to provide pinpoint functionality at your fingertips without having to boot ro lug around your laptop/desktop.

If the same amount of manhours was put into getting a real PDA environment on top of linux (ie. syncs with outlook, has a taskpad, reads word docs etc) instead of repeated ports of X/perl/gcc/emacs to a handheld, the linux would already dominate the handheld market...
if you want something starting to get close, look at opie.handhelds.org... They aren't there yet but at least its not another "port the kitchen sink to handheld xyz" project.

I'm looking forward to the future...

Imagine on of these or something of simular size with a 60 GB HDD, 2 Gig RAM, 300 Mhz Sysclock, 1280 resolution and OpenGL 2 hardware 3D acceleration with 128 RAM of texturespace.
UT2k3 or T2 on the bus. When you get bored you fire up blender and start building some new mods. Cool.

Or something like this:
"X is doing a LAN Party. I think I'll drop by and play a match or two."
"You have to go home and get your box."
"No, I got it right here in my jacketpocket" :-)

long overdue

The Zaurus is really nifty hardware, but it has been held back by QPE: the Qt/Embedded based desktop made it very hard to port GUI apps to the Zaurus and it was slow and memory hungry compared to X11. It also really didn't have a very good GUI in my opinion.

I don't know whether the X11-based GUI will be any more usable as a PDA, but I do know that with a full X11 environment, the Zaurus can carve out a niche for itself for "vertical apps" (applications specific to particular industry sectors) that previously required far too much effort to port to Qt.

Furthermore, with a 640x480 screen and a 200-400MHz processor, the argument that the handheld should run anything other than desktop software becomes really weak anyway.

Slash gets it backwards, as usual

This is truly bringing desktop linux to the PDA.

That's not a PDA, that's a micro-laptop. It has a processor, lots of RAM, a display, and a keyboard. Granted, we surpassed those specs 5-10 years ago, but it really is a laptop. So it's natural a full Linux distro would work, as would DOS and Windows.

What browser is usable with it?

Mozilla and Firebird are incredibly slow on these processors. Dillo doesn't even do Frames, much less SSL and such, plus it's not very pen friendly.

What browsers can be used with these tiny, slow, pen based systems that won't make you want to gouge your eyeballs out?

If only I had a Zaurus.....

I've been eyeing a Sharp Zaurus 5500 for a long time now, and I finally dropped $400cdn for one on ebay, from one of those companies that works completely through ebay, based in singapore. Well it's 4 months later, they've taken my money, and ceased all communications. Now they claim to have no record of me at all.

I'm a poor student, and I can't afford to throw that kind of money away. But so far eBay is of no help, and I feel helpless. The company is Chedware [chedware.com]. I don't know what slashdotters can do, but I can't stay silent about this.

Re:heh

I'm sorry, but I swear that if I see another one of these 'Their server must be running on *Insert device in article here*' trolls, I'm going to shoot somebody.

It's not funny, nobody cares.

plural

I think you mean "Sharp Zaurii"... ;)