Re: HP Jornada 728 for everyday life?

Hi,

> - How much extended  battery life lasts? I red that batteries
>   allows up to 14 hours of life. Is this true ? If not, how much the
>   battery *really* lasts using it with NetBSD ?

I have a Jornada 720 and that lasts a little over 2 hours on battery with
a wireless card.  I'm not sure whether that has anything to do with the
fact that the battery is quite old.

> - What is better for battery life, microdrives os compact flash cards?

The Jornada 720 doesn't take Microdrives --- are you sure the 728 does?

> - Using wireless, are there any limitations? I plan to use it at home
>   (wpa/tkip pre shares key) and at school (open network! :-D), but not
>   only: can i do wireless sniffing, packet capturing and similar things
>   with a pcmcia wireless card?

I have a Cisco Aironet 350 (an(4) driver).  Remember that you need a
16-bit card --- I don't think you can get 16-bit 802.11g cards.  I have
a few problems with the card --- ifconfig an0 list scan just sits there
and does nothing, although I did have wistumbler2 working at one point.
Also, wpa_supplicant doesn't seem to work.

> - I thougt to use the 728 to connect to my home network sometimes,
>   using somthing as OpenVPN or Vtun, and to sync my data with rsync or
>   something similar. Do you think it is possible?

I don't see why not.

> - Using OpenVPN or Vtun, i plan to mount a remote NFS resource (a shared
>   hard disk on my home server, about 250 GB). Would it be possible ?

Yep, mine is perfectly happy with NFS mounts, though I haven't tried
over any kind of tunnel, but I don't see why that should be a problem
(if it is, it shouldn't be specific to this architecture).

> - I think i'll use remote X client from my home net to enlight the load
>   on the 728. Do you think it is possible ?

Yep, that's certainly possible.

> - What about cryptography? I used to sign and sometimes encrypt my 
>   email with GnuPG. Would it be too much slow on the 728?

It's 206MHz, so it might be slower than what you're used to, but I don't
think it should be too slow to be usable.

> sometimes surf the web (with elinks or if needed, with dillo

There's also netsurf.  It works on my 720, but rather slowly due to the
lack of RAM.  I suspect it might just be usable on the 728 since that
has twice as much RAM as the 720.


Alex

-- 
  -----------------------< Alexander Frolkin >-----------------------
  -----< [email protected] >-----< http://www.eldamar.org.uk/ >-----
     ``I can't believe it.  You actually found a practical use for
       geometry!''    -- Bart Simpson, ``Dead Putting Society''