I no longer own my Zaurus; while it was a lovely device and I sometimes miss it I just didn't use it enough to justify keeping it. I think the keyboard was slightly too small for my liking. Anyway, I've left this page up in case it's useful to anyone.

I bought this because I wanted a small device that actually had a keyboard. I decided to import it from Japan myself; ShirtPocket or Dynamism will do so for you, but charge a premium. I ended up using PriceJapan whose customer service sucks (I never received a single email from them), but they did manage a stunning turnaround of 3.5 days.

TRIsoft have a very helpful page on converting the Zaurus from Japanese to English, including screenshots of exactly what to push when you boot it for the first time. The only other problem I had is that the Sharp supplied power adaptor is for the Japanese market and only runs at 100V. I'd have thought any PDA should come with a universal adaptor! Anyway, it's output is rated at 5V, 1A. I had a 6V, 350ma adaptor that fitted, so I tried it and the orange charging light started to flash. All good I thought. 2 hours later, unplugged it and turned it on for the first time and it worked. Result, thought I. Except that later it turned out the battery must have just had some charge in it. Few hours of panic when I think I've fried it (when the charging light is no longer coming on when I attach the adaptor). In short, the charging light comes on a steady orange when the device is charging. And it draws around 0.77A at 5V, so you really do need a 1A capable device.

For networking I picked up a Prism2 based CF card off eBay; it was detected without issues, I typed in my WEP key and it connected to my home network. It's also easy to switch between wireless profiles, so you can have a non WEPed setup for when you're out and about.

I've had some difficulty getting USB networking to my desktop up and running. It seems that although the C3000 presents as 0x04dd/0x9031 like the C750/C760 it has a bInterfaceSubClass of 10 (Mobile Direct Line) rather than 6 (CDC ethernet). I haven't got round to frobbing the driver to see if that helps (I'm running 2.6.11). It's less important now I have wireless really. Also when I shove it in mass storage mode I find that although the desktop detects it fine I get lots of alert boxes popping up on the Zaurus and I can't actually mount the device. I need to prod more I guess.

I eventually ended up running OpenZaurus on it. At first with a kuldgey pivotroot hack and the Sharp 2.4 kernel, but then the wonderful Richard Purdie got 2.6 up and running and it became able to mount the internal HD directly as /. Great stuff. OpenZaurus also got me into OpenEmbedded, which I've found to be a great way of getting rootfs up and running for embedded devices. Well worth a look if you play with any of this sort of hardware - definitely better than having to roll it all yourself!

Links

OpenZaurus - My distro of choice when I still had my Zaurus.
Zaurus SL-C3000 Restoration From Scratch - Thankfully I haven't had to use this, but nice to know it can be done.
OE Forums - C3000 General discussions - I don't really like web forums, but this is useful, as other the other forums on the site that aren't tied to specific models.
Photos of my Zaurus - lets you see just how tiny it is.