[nonhuman]

Can anyone recommend a good Linux-based PDA? The only one I really know about is the Zaurus. I like it, but some comparissons would be good.

[webb3201]

I have tried three Linux based PDAs at this point. As a fairly inexperienced Linux user, I can give you some thoughts on the overall impressions. I cannot go to deep into the distributions and the nitty gritty.

The Agenda, an iPaq (flashed to Linux), and the Zaurus.

The Agenda was a very poor machine. It was nowhere near as well provisioned in hardware orsoftware.

The iPaq was a first generation unti which you can buy for about 150.00 on ebay. You can then flash to unix yourself and have a nice machine to work with.
The Zaurus was by far the closest to being a machine you could actually use as a PDA rather than as a tinkering toy.

I loved the hardware with the builtin keyboard and multiple expansion slots. They have a strong development community and have supplied most of the applications you would expect withe a mainstream machine. My biggest problem was that I felt I was fighting with the machine more than using it as a tool. Look for the 5000d (developers) unit on ebay for around 200.00. It only has 32 mb of internal memory but you can use a memory card to make up the difference and save a large bit.

not sure if that helped.

[nonhuman]

It did actually. That's about what I expected. Most of what I've been able to find seems to say that there isn't really any worthwhile competition to the Zaurus, though I saw something about a European one that looked like it might have some potential (don't remember the name though).

Does anyone know if BestBuy might have a Zaurus that could be played with? Unfortunately I don't think there are any other stores around here that I could try.

[marusin]

Yes, the Best Buys by me all have Zaurus's on display... Same goes for CompUSAs (don' tknow if you have any around you or not)....

As a matter of fact, the last time I was at Best Buy, they had an open box Zaurus (the one with 64mb internal... my dad has that one) with everything but the cradle for $200... I almost bought it, but opted not to for some reason..

The one thing to think about is the fact that I don't think you can sync the Zaurus with the Mac (at least yet)... Just something to chew on.. Good luck!

[The Dude]

There are more out there than I thought there were.

http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8728350077.html

[nonhuman]

Originally posted by The Dude:
There are more out there than I thought there were.

http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8728350077.html

Yeah, I really want to try out the firewalker ...when it comes out ...in Germany.