Opie !

The world of PDA is growing every days.

If we look closely around us in the street, bus or at work, a lot of peoples use PDA as agenda, phonebook, music player or even game console. The popularity of these small computer is rising every years.

This market as a big potential, but there are only few company that's willing to risk their position to come out with OS for these computers. Here's a list of some of theme:

• Microsoft is deploying WindowsCE on PocketPC hardware ( the hardware is made by other vendors such as HP, Dell, etc... ).
• PalmOne is deploying PalmOS on their Palm.
• Sharp is deploying QTopia on their Sharp Zaurus.
• And more...

Ok, I'll stop blathering about anything, back to the point...

A few months ago I bought a iPAQ, one of HP's PocketPC.
I had all the time I needed to evaluate WindowsCE.
The thing I discovered ar that the OS is restrictive, not realy pretty, not totaly stable ( even if some peoples tell it is ) and lack of built-in features...

Here's a small resume of WindowsCE down-sides :

• There is no way to shut the screen off when listening MP3 to save battery time
  
• It's very hard to Deactivate/Activate infrared device to save the battery
• Only third-party software can read OGG ( half my music collection is in OGG )
  
• The start menu and the 'desktop' are not flexible enough
• There is no taskbar
• The calendar is ugly and unfriendly
• When an meeting alarm pop and the user don't hear the sound, the device stay on until the battery dies
• The OS randomly crash and reset
• There are no updates or patches to fix these problems

After cursing on the device for some time, I discovered Opie. Its nice QT interface took my heart :D I started by looking if my device was compatible - Yheaa, it's an iPAQ 3835 Next I looked at the install documentation The first thing that made me hesitate was the little warning about the fact that if the install of the bootloader fail, the iPAQ is changed in a nice brick ! Quite disturbing...

But this was not enough to make me change my mind !
The only thing is the be sure you won't have a power shortage while reinstalling the bootloader ( even if the battry would be enough to power the device for the whole process ) :D

After a backup of the device, the install of the bootloader and a nice little terminal session to install the new image, everything was done!

I now have a fully functional Opie PDA !

To have all the features I wanted, I configured the PDA's network and then installed the following supplementary packages :

• Opie Eye
• Opie Record
• Opie Sheet
• Opie Write
• PDF viewer
• XMMS
• Mine hunt

Opie is a really good PDA system, but I ran in a few bugs...

1. The sound always do a glitch when starting to play
   Solution :
   cat > /etc/init.d/fixaudio <<> #!/bin/sh cat /dev/dsp > /dev/null EOF chmod a+x /etc/init.d/fixaudio cd /etc/rc2.d ln -s ../init.d/fixaudio S98fixaudio
   
2. The clock always reset to the Image's default at reboot
   Solution :
   cd /etc/rc2.d ln -s ../init.d/hwclock.sh S22hwclock
   
3. Sometime the SD card is not detected when going out of sleep mode.
   
4. Sometime the task in the calendar only take half the supposed length space
   

For the final words, even with these bugs, Opie is my choice of OS for PocketPC, good bye Windows CE !

Yay for Linux !!