Konqueror-embedded under opie yielded some suprises when I started playing with it. There were a couple of crashes, first of all. I realize that K's long exposure to users in KDE and use by Apple as a core for OS X's Safari is no guarantee that K-embedded is going to be crash free, but then again, I didn't really subject the browser to much before it tubed on me. In contrast, Opera under Qtopia has been a solid piece of software in my experience.

Here's the deal killer for me: K simply cannot be used to access AOL mail, or gmail. Entering in gmail.com would invariably yield an error that indicated I could not access google.com, though if I entered google.com in the URL bar I could get to google no problem. I couldn't login to Yahoo to read email either, regardless of repeated attempts entering my user name and password.

I did some searching on the web and noticed that this was a widespread problem, and not just with K-embedded. K simply doesn't do gmail. Perhaps it is because K doesn't send a user-agent string; seems like the K folks feel that user-agent strings are evil and refuse to implement one.

Ebay? Not much better. I couldn't check My Ebay, as it resulted in a similar error. I was able to search for one auction from the search field on the Ebay home page, but subsequent attempts to search exposed a focus problem (the edit field contained a blinking caret, but keystokes were not being displayed). This could have been a problem with opie, for all I know. But it was a deal killer, whatever the cause.

This was enough for me to think, yeah, I want firefox on my Zaurus -- if I can't get my webmail for crying out loud, or use Ebay, what use is there in living with a Zaurus?

I saw some layout issues on pages, where characters that began paragraphs or sentences would be replicated on a line above. Didn't bother looking into the HTML related to this to see what might be the catalyst.

Frames don't look like they are implemented in K-embedded; http://www.sydlogan.com/fineart only displayed the rightmost frame for example.

There is no facility for downloading content, e.g., tried to grab a package from OpenZaurus and it just displays the content of a package file in hex, no 'Save link target as...' support.

K embedded just doesn't cut it. Opera is far better. And probably a better target for minimo under opie.

To that end, I went on to try to grab opera and install it. I found a 7.x package at http://www.zaurususergroup.org/, and tried to install it:

-- search for Opera 7 in the downloads section.

-- scroll down to Opera 7.30 build 9965 for SL-5x00

From console:

# ipkg -d sd install opera_sl-5x00-7.30.9965_arm.ipk

# ipkg-link -d sd opera

restart opie.

The result: I get a nice Opera 7 icon in the apps tab, but it fails to run, due to a unresolved Qt 3 symbol.

-- go to Package Manager

-- install to sd with -force-depends option the package lib-qtmt3 (deduced this might be the right package after searching for the error message displayed when I tried starting opera from a console, running from opie hides error information, and there is no console log UI that can be used to obtain error output).

Anyway, this never led to a successful launch of Opera; perhaps some fiddling with install order -- e.g., installing Qt3 before installing Opera would have got me a success. But I don't need to; I have been using Opera for years on various Z and know what it offers, and wouldn't expect to learn much installing it under opie I suspect.

In other news, I bought a new 5500 off of e-bay so I can flash open zaurus and gpe onto it, and hopefully play with minimo there. The mozilla site implies it runs there (or has in the past). The steps are nearly the same as used to get open zaurus and opie up and running, just a different image file.

But my feeling is the real prize is opie; gpe is cool, and an accomplishment no doubt, but opie (and qtopia) is going to be the holy grail I think. Which means Qt. I know, I wrote a book on Gtk+ -- how could I even think of writing Qt code... :-).