[GLLUG] Zaurus questions...

[Matt Graham]

I finally broke down and bought a Zaurus.  It looks really nice, still 
having a bit of trouble with the handwriting recognition but that'll 
clear up after I've practiced more.  Haven't tried syncing it yet, 
since the Qtopia Desktop package for Linux doesn't actually have 
installation instructions (just INSTALL_WIN32.TXT, though the files in 
the tarball are Linux executables and shared libraries.)  I've compiled 
the usbdnet module and it appears to work.

One reason I bought this was so that I could put files from Project 
Gutenberg on it, so I'd have a reasonably large library in something 
much smaller than a paperback book.  Also, I've got documentation for a 
variety of things in HTML format, and I'd like to be able to browse 
that in the included Opera browser or something.  Unfortunately, the 
unit behaves like a total pig when I ask Opera to load a 400K HTML 
document with simple formatting (<P>, <B>, <H1> through <H3>, <I>, a 
few <a href=> , etcetera.)  It takes Opera 5 to 10 seconds to scroll 
down 1 screenwidth, and over a minute to load the document in the first 
place.

Yes, I know this handheld is not going to be super-fast, but it should 
surely work better than that... right?  The 400K document in question 
was on a CF card, which is much slower than the unit's RAM, but this 
document should've been loaded into the disk cache (which was ~10M at 
that time) immediately.  Is it that this embedded Opera can't handle 
large documents very well, or is there some really obvious thing I 
should be doing here?  (Or an HTML/text viewer that's lighter than 
Opera?)

Oh well, it'll be a fun toy regardless....

-- 
   Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there.
   He wasn't there again today -- I think he's from the CIA.
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see