[ winterkoninkje.net ]

When on my trip to Japan in 2005, I had the fortune to pick up a zaurus, a line of PDAs produced by Sharp and mostly limited to sale in Japan. Running linux with a 4GB harddrive, it's less of a PDA and more of a palmtop computer, a realization of mobile computing that PDAs are too feeble to offer but laptops are too bulky to provide. Outside of Japan (and even within, no doubt) the zaurii have gained a cult following amongst geeks and gurus alike.

The particular model I got was the SL-C3100, the newest top of the line model. It's sort of a combination between the SL-C3000 which first introduced the 4GB HDD, and the SL-C1000 which had more flash RAM. Much in the tradition of hluc's pages, these document my various customizations, mods, and development for the zaurus known as Elsamelys.

Sorry this is all crammed on one page right now. As I fill out this page I'll break the sections off into pages of their own and make this the table of contents page.

Base Stats : SL-C3100 (Borzoi)

Hardware

USB On-The-Go (OTG) is a new extension to the USB 2.0 standard. The new OTG connector allows you to plug in either mini-A or mini-B cables. When mini-A is used the zaurus acts as a host so you can plug in peripherals like keyboards, mice, drives, and such. When mini-B is used, the z acts as a client allowing it to act as merely an external harddrive to a host box.

There are three standard USB 2.0 speeds defined by the USB-Implementers Forum. These are High (480Mb/s), Full (12Mb/s, same as USB 1.1), and Low (1.5Mb/s). In order to be USB 2.0 compliant, one or more of these speeds must be implemented. The z implements Full Speed data rate for file transfers and Low Speed data rate for peripherals. It does not implement High Speed at all. (This information mercilessly sacked from hluc's pages. hluc also has some nice pictures of the connectors.)

Hardware Accessories — A list of the accessories I've gotten for Elys and the research I've done on which accessories work. Very important notes on doing wireless and on large (2GB and greater) SD cards.

Basic Software

The zaurus comes with a wide variety of software preinstalled including a PIM suite, an office suite (Hancom), and plenty of others. Rather than list everything that comes preinstalled I'll discuss the ones I found particularly cool.

The Zdict dictionary is incredibly similar to the zten dictionary you'll hear much about online. I haven't looked at zten yet, nor have I used any other dictionary programs in the past, but I rather like zdict. In addition to the Genius, Translator, and Kojien dictionaries that ship with the zaurus there are a number of other ones available [...]

Speaking of the Translator dictionary, another one of the cool programs is a Japanese-English/English-Japanese translator: 翻訳これ一本. It's still a machine translator with the limitations that implies, but it's a very good one compared to the others I've seen. You can even configure to an extent how certain ambiguous/untranslatable things are translated.

The other two are only really cool if you're in Japan. The MobileMap Navi is a map of all of Japan. You can move the map around by dragging with the stylus, can zoom in, streets and rivers and cities are labled, et cetera. It'd be nice to figure out their map's format and whether the program can be told to load different maps so that you could run the program with maps installed for the countries (states/provinces, cities...) you're interested in / visiting.

The third sweet program is 乗換案内 (norikae) which is a map/trip-planner for the trains throughout Japan. I think it might just be limited to JR trains, but even still quite helpful for making your way around Tôkyô, Ôsaka, and Kôbe (and surely other places I haven't been). Again, it'd be cool to find out if the program is sufficiently versatile as to be able to load maps/tables from other areas; I know having a Tri-met trip planner equivalent that I can carry with me would be great.

Mac OS X

Zaurii ship with the ability to communicate with Windows; just plug up the USB cable and the zaurus becomes a slave external harddrive to the PC. However, there's no support for connecting your zaurus with Mac OS X, my OS of choice. Thankfully there are a bunch of others interested in making Zaurus-OSX communication happen as well.

The first step towards communication is networking. Andreas Junghans began work on a kernel extension driver allowing your mac to communicate with the zaurus over USB as if it were ethernet. (N.B. the zaurus can't communicate back the same way, so you can, say, ssh into the zaurus over USB, but not from the zaurus.) With the driver installed you can use ssh (from the commandline) or samba (command-k then the url smb://192.168.129.201 unless you've changed the IP address) to access your z. Andreas has handed over the AJZaurusUSB project to H. Nikolaus Schaller who is currently maintaining it.

Now that you can communicate, the second task is trying to sync your mac's PIM (iCal, AddressBook,...) with the z's (カレンダー, アドレス帳, ToDo). The OSX PIMs are pretty good, though the z's are a bit limited. So while syncing their respective standard PIMs may be the only feasable goal, ideally we could sync any PIMs of choice. There are a number of different groups trying to reach this grail. The one I think is the most promising is zXSync. Though if you dislike that project for some reason, there are two programs named Zaurus Mac Sync: SourceForge and Dsitri (non-free); and there may be other projects in the works.

Another place to take a look for OSX related zaurus things is James Durbin's zsync and zlinks pages.

Language Localization

The zaurus ships localized to speak to you in Japanese. This makes perfect sense since they're market is Japan. However, ironically, Qtopia and Linux are predominantly designed in English and so Sharp had to translate everything into Japanese, and now we have to switch it all back.

There are a number of methods of switching the z to using English, some of which retain the Japanese capabilities, some of which don't. Personally, the Japanese is considered a benefit and so I went with a method that presents dialogues et cetera in English but which retains the ability to display Japanese characters and accept Japanese input.

The method I used was largely that presented by hluc. I couldn't get his c3000-custom-jaen_0.1_arm.ipk package to work on my SL-C3100, so I wrote my own shell script that performs the commands shown on the website as well as some other modifications I always want (using a .bash_profile file, giving all user accounts passwords,...). An online copy of the script with associated files is forthcoming.

Additional Software

The preinstalled software can cover basic needs, but Elys is to be more than just a PDA, I plan for her to replace the need to carry my laptop around on a regular basis. Fuchi will still be mobile, but more for when I actually need a full computer. So here's some of the customizations and software I've installed: [...]

Other Links