Re: Linux Beer Hike

["Alex Hudson" <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

> Bulky? Hmmm, not too sure about that. ENIAC, know that was bulky...
> I want battery life over anything else, and Psion are hard to beat.
> (No Wince machines beat it AFAIK)

I was referring to the Series 7 +  really, although if you don't think
they're bulky, we probably disagree ;)

> Linux is simply too big for a handheld IMO. You don't need loads of
> networking, filesystems and whatnot in a machine like a Psion.

I'd disagree there too. Something like a vanilla SuSE kernel, yep, way too
big, but you can get full distros on a single floppy. Once you start cutting
back the device drivers to the set you actually *need* (i.e., with a custom
distro, you can cut out the support for hardware you don't have) you find
you actually have a lot of room.

As for networking, well, Psion seem to disagree with you, because that's
what's going into EPOC these days: network stacks, network protocols (IRDA,
Bluetooth, WAP, etc.), Java, etc...

> EPOC  isn't really a "proper" OS (well R5 is closer) but it's small.

I'd disagree with that completely ;)) In what sense is EPOC not an OS?

> EPOC v. WinCE. Heh.

No contest ;)))

> I can't see the point in Linux on something with a screen that small.
> (I'll qualify that statement now :)
> You can't do REAL work, you need something convenient and foolproof just
> to do email/contacts/and maybe a few little bits of text processing. It
> really annoys me that the only new laptops you can buy are 300MHz plus
> machines. My desktop is 266MHz and I still haven't found anything other
than
> games that would make me want to upgrade in the near future.
> Psion has Word, Email and Addressbook. That's about all I need, why bother
> having a proper OS? It's not like I'll be running a web server on it.

Your arguement assumes that EPOC / SIBO aren't true operating systems, and
that is something I'd disagree completely with.

Cheers,

Alex.

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