More Applications for the Zaurus

In case you've already plowed through the tools and utilities presented in the extensive "Applications for the Zaurus" article that posted earlier this week, here are some more examples of the flurry of activity surrounding the Zaurus.

The excellent CMU speech tools have been ported to the Zaurus. Available from www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/packed/flite-1.1/, they can read aloud any text file by using the Zaurus sound chip and earphones.

The only fault may be the heavy accent of this British application, yet its uniqueness makes it a must-have to impress others PDA owners or to quietly read today's news headlines.

Another excellent application available for a demo is the Quake 3-D game. Although it really cannot be enjoyed on the Zaurus because of the small screen and low resolution, it is good enough to spend more than a couple minutes playing.

The Quake files should be downloaded from www.zauruszone.com/feed. For maximum performance, Quake should be installed into the RAM and started with the following command:

quake -nosound -width 240 -height 200 -basedir /opt/QtPalmtop/quake/data

A Qtopia native Palm emulator should be available by the time you read this article. With QPose, you no longer need to start X to use Palm applications; simply download the native emulator from www.climov.com/zaurus/qpose

On that site you also will find QMame, a Zaurus port of the famous arcade game emulator, QPacman, a reprise of the classic arcade game, and Alphaclock, a transparent clock running in the background.

Unit conversion, especially between the metric and the imperial system, can be painful. Although the Zaurus comes with a good calculator, it does not let you convert units easily because of the lack of programmable functions. An excellent converter, however, is available from zuc.sf.net. This application will certainly become popular among the Linux physics geeks.

Just like freshmeat.net is a central place for the GNU/Linux community, two web sites gather most of the published Zaurus software. www.zauruszone.com/feed/ and www.killefiz.de/zaurus certainly will cover all your software needs. For example, from these sites you could find an excellent PDF reader called qpdf or a Java portscanner called JPortScan. Be sure to check these two repositories before looking elsewhere for the software you need.

Guylhem Aznar is the coordinator of the LDP and the documentation coordinator for the GNU Project. A medical student in real life, he enjoys playing with his Zaurus.