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Software

This thing covers all the software basics. Navigation is very easy, and everything is clear and uncluttered. There are five major groups: apps, games, jeode (java apps), settings, and documents, for all files that aren't applications. You can navigate to each easily with the buttons on the front of the Zaurus, or using the touch screen. The menu bar at the bottom of the screen gives you easy access to time, volume control, battery status, external card status, network status, application switching, and a start button. Again, it's all laid out to make it pretty easy to get around and do stuff; there's no confusion.

The sync software, the good

The Zaurus comes with two kinds of sync software: Qtopia Desktop and Intellisync. The Intellisync is for syncing with MS Outlook, and because I don't run Outlook, I can't tell you anything about that. The Qtopia Desktop I do run; it's basically the same thing as Palm's Desktop software. I had no trouble setting it up with Windows 2k. I followed the directions, and it hooked up no problem. Setting up the Linux version was a little more difficult. The Windows version comes with the Zaurus on CD, the Linux version I had to download from Trolltech. They screwed up and put the Win32 install instructions in the .tgz file instead of the Linux instructions, so I had to go download an older version to get the correct install instructions.

Mandrake 8.2 almost recognized the Zaurus from scratch. When you plug in the Zaurus, it is recognized as a USB device, and Mandrake tries to load the driver for it. Unfortunately, it loads the wrong driver. Messing around with modules.usbmap I changed a couple of values for the usbdnet driver and now Mandrake loads up the correct driver. I added an ifcfg-usb0 file in the network-scripts directory, and now I have a hot-plugable interface. The Qtopia Desktop hooked up, no problem, and I was able to sync from the Zaurus to my Linux desktop without any trouble.

The sync software, the bad

The Qtopia Desktop software is flaky. I would not recommend this setup to a novice PDA user. It is possible that my impression is influenced by my coming out of a Palm-based world, but the software doesn't seem to work the way I would expect it too when syncing. I have twice lost significant amounts of address entries or calendar entries do to syncing issues. I have found that the only way I can reliably enter stuff is to leave the sync software on "PDA overrides desktop." When entering lots of data in the desktop side, I then manually switch it to "desktop overrides PDA," do a sync, then back to "PDA overrides desktop."

The issues mostly come up when you enter stuff on the desktop or change things on the desktop while there are already similar entries on the PDA. It doesn't handle this well. For this reason, I would say this setup is not for the general consumer. Only people who know how to be careful should use it. The Intellisync software may be better, but again, I haven't tested it. The Linux version I have was just released this weekend (it's listed as a beta version).

Miscellaneous issues

There is one major security issue: The version of Linux the Zaurus runs does not come with support for IPtables or IPchains. This wouldn't be horrible (it actually disables a lot of the normal daemons that are problems) except for one screw-up. Someone decided to use FTP as the syncing software's conduit, and even better, it logs in as root with no password! So the qpe daemon (which is the Zaurus GUI interface) also has an ftp daemon running on port 4242 with root login and no password, and it is bound to all ports, all IP addresses! The Zaurus comes with tcpwrappers, but qpe doesn't run through that, so if you hook the Zaurus up to a network, root file read/write access is available to all. You can set a root password, which at least puts a password into the mix, but reports are that it kills the sync ability (I haven't investigated this yet).

At the moment, this isn't a terrible issue for me, because I'm using my Zaurus as a PDA without an Internet/external network connection for now. But because I plan on purchasing a network card for it, I also plan on figuring out some way to firewall this thing off from the outside world.

Summary

The Zaurus is a great hardware device with some minor and major software issues. I would recommend this device to Linux and computer-savvy people who want a very flexible PDA, with warnings about the potential issues. Most of these issues can be avoided with some care.

This is a new product, and like many new products it has bugs. I hope these bugs will be fixed quickly, and given the Open Source nature of the device, this should be possible. It would be a shame for a couple of stupid mistakes to ruin the Zaurus potential. I'm happy with my purchase, and look forward to putting this little beast to some hardcore sysadmin/programming work!