Zaurus with a new lease on life
Today I followed some great instructions on how to put OpenZaurus on my Sharp Zaurus SL-5500. It worked like a charm! The Opie GUI is pretty slick, fast, and easy. And the initial image gives you a console window you can use to actually have a command prompt. 🙂
The plan is to try to make it take over DHCP & DNS services, at least, for our home network. Heh.
Update: So far so good. DHCP is working just fine, and maradns, the OpenZaurus choice instead of BIND, is nice and fast and slim for all DNS, including recursive lookups of random domains (i.e., Web traffic is behaving fine). Yippee! The little Zaurus is on my desk, doing most of the work of the 265MHz old box humming away in the corner. You could put hundreds of the Zaurus (Zauri?) in the space taken by the old server. And we’ll talk later about the power consumption dropping to 5 watts/2 amps, compared to the PC’s 230W power supply with spinning disks, whirring fans, and far more live motherboard circuits…