An announcement from Chris Larson of the OpenZaurus project . . .

Greetings all,

I hereby announce the release of OpenZaurus 3.0, the highly anticipated new release of the alternative Linux distribution for the Sharp Zaurus SL5000d and SL5500[g] PDAs. OpenZaurus is now a debian based embedded distribution built from source, from the ground up. Our intent is to continue to produce a solid Linux distribution for the Sharp Zaurus. We will continue to use the latest available Opie, and we will make Picogui and X root filesystems available. Ports of OpenZaurus to other PDAs and/or other embedded systems are imminent, though we may need a name change at that point :)

OpenZaurus was built from the ground up to be extremely configurable and powerful. The addition of writable flash extended this further, by easily allowing people to make tweaks to their Z to be just the way they like it. The content in the rom image by default is kept very minimal, as the advent of the writable root filesystem means that the user can pick and choose themselves what they want in flash. OZ does not include Jeode, Hancom apps, or Opera at the moment due to licensing reasons. However, konqueror/embedded is available as a browser, and there exist scripts which allow you to build ipks of said applications from your Sharp ROM before switching to OpenZaurus. With regard to the Java VM, Kaffe is currently available for commandline items, an upcoming set of bindings for direct-to-framebuffer graphics in Java is coming soon, and we're looking into getting Qt2 bindings for Kaffe or some other open source VM.

The GUI included in OpenZaurus is Opie, which though it started as a fork of the Qtopia codebase, has quite surpassed it in nearly every way, and includes numerous additional applications, such as the user manager, drawpad, et cetera. Picogui and X packages for OZ are also available, and rom images with them preinstalled will be coming soon.

I would also like to announce the unveiling of OpenZaurus.org, the OpenZaurus web resource, as well as the newly created OpenZaurus mailing lists. The links to them follow.

Applicable Links . . .

• OpenZaurus website
  
• Download!
  
• Changelog!
  
• Install Guide!
  
• FAQ
  
• Bug Tracking System
  
• Opie Bug Tracking System
  
• Opie site 1
  
• Opie site 2
  
• Opie site 3
  
• Opie Users Manual

Irc: #zaurus, #openzaurus, and #opie channels on the Freenode network

Mailing Lists . . .

• lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/openzaurus-announce
  
• lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/openzaurus-devel
  
• lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/openzaurus-users
  
• handhelds.org/mailman/listinfo/opie-cvs
  
• handhelds.org/mailman/listinfo/opie

Mailing List Archives . . .

• sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=7536
  
• sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=11924
  
• sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=11798
  
• handhelds.org/pipermail/opie-cvs
  
• handhelds.org/pipermail/opie

Thanks a lot!

— Chris Larson (kergoth at handhelds dot org)

 
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