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It's often ___immeasureably__ useful to get some (any) kind of console output when porting Linux to an existing device running e.g. windows mobile 5 or 6. Take a look at HaRET. Porting is often harder than most would imagine, as some manufacturers actively use hardware obfuscation methods to prevent hacktivists from getting console access.

Try to imagine how long it would take to use LEDs or haptic feedback to iteratively check all conditions required to bring up Linux on a board without a serial port. The first thing you would probably do is try to use a hardware subsystem that was known to work and fashion a serial port out of it. This is the same concept but graphical.

Great work!

The one I've used is called HaRET, which is both a debugger-ish thing that lets you play with physical memory and GPIO ports, and a LOADLIN-style bootloader.

How different then, would doing this kind of thing be from installing Linux on a PocketPC/Windows CE device such as an iPaq? Yes, that is possible, but it is far from straightforward. I imagine the device is significantly different from a standard PC and more like a PocketPC-based ARM handheld or smartphone, and one ought to be considering it as such. I assume that such a device will not have some Palladium-like trusted computing system similar to what one sees in some gaming consoles which prevents one from easily changing the OS arbitrarily, but even so, getting everything to work is likely to be a major chore.

(yes, applicaitons would need to be re-compiled, but for many apps that's all it would take).

it's not that simple. this porting howto from handhelds.org have some good info on the subject:

http://handhelds.org/minihowto/porting-software.html

the most important issue there when porting from x86 to arm is the pointer alignement thing.

I pre-ordered my N900 through Amazon a few weeks back. I figured it'd be easier to get Android working under Maemo than the other way around.

Also, Maemo has a pretty long history of development. I was actually planning on buying an N810 a few months ago until I found out that the N900 might actually have a decent GPS.

Plus, Android phones will be cheap and easy to come by... so hopefully I'll get one for my wife and get to play with it there. But what I've always really wanted in my pocket was a little debian box, and the N900 is pretty much the first thing that fits the bill in that respect. I could care less about the smartphone bit, other than the network connectivity, and of course the fact that I shouldn't need to carry a separate mobile phone around with me anymore.

I played around with Familiar linux (from http://handhelds.org/ ) on an old IPaq for a while, but it was always a bit frustrating that the hardware support wasn't completely there. So it shouldn't be too hard for Nokia to improve upon that experience :P

I really do hope Google caves in to the demand for a native google maps / google earth application on the Maemo, though.

Palm used to have a pretty neat developer community that would make their stuff do all kinds of wacky things. I've read a bit about the original creator of the Palm Pilot and how his company would get bought out and all the corporate folks would come in, and then he'd run off and start another company (Handspring) and introduce new ways to expand the device (remember the springboard modules? I actually had the GSM visorphone module one way back when). Anyway, I'm pretty distraught that Palm is kinda going the Apple way... they sort of replaced the expansion modules with SDIO, but now in the Palm Pre they got rid of expansion memory entirely (probably to lock you in to installing apps from their online store or via their proprietary conduit). Anyway, I had been holding out for Palm's Linux-based OS for years, but now that the Pre is here, I'm holding out even longer for Nokia's N900 "pocket debian box".

I've played with Familiar Linux ( http://handhelds.org/ ) on an old HP iPaq for a while, but the touchscreen gave out just as I had figured out a semi-usable configuration. Unfortunately, it didn't have much support from HP, so things like suspend or audio never worked completely right.

So I've been pretty excited about Nokia's whole Maemo effort, and even got the dev emulator running on my box at home. (Haven't figured out what to do next with it, other than look at the menu system :P ). It seems to have an emulator for legacy Palm apps as well, and I've also seen mention of it doing Android apps. I'd have just been happy with a decent ssh client :) After having used midpssh on a Blackberry, I'm looking forward to having a keyboard with a ctrl key.

They have quite a few years of community development effort behind them already with their previous models. I'm a bit concerned about their upcoming migration from gtk to qt, but applaud Nokia for buying Qt from Trolltech and releasing it under an OSS license, probably single-handedly saving the KDE project from Stallmanist criticism. I'm not even a big fan of KDE, but there are a few apps in there that are better than their GNOME counterparts.

Sorry for sounding like a shill, but I've always been pretty happy with Nokia... back in the 90's I bought one of their midrange phones and could actually set up and use a lot of the features like speeddial or voice dialing without having to crack open the manual. Even today I still have phone (Sony Ericsson, Samsung, etc.) where I have to dig around way too much to figure out how to simply sync my address book with my SIM card. I've also had good experiences with the hardware... dropped the phones several times without problems, once I managed to repair a corroded battery inside my phone, and recently my wife put her Nokia in the dryer with wet camping equipment for about 20 minutes and it still worked. The casing melted off, but we bought a new faceplate and still use it :P

Anyway, that's all the anecdotes I have on the subject.

Pre uses a package manager? News to me.

Yes.

"a great example of Microsoft's openness to generally license our patents under fair and reasonable terms so long as licensees respect Microsoft intellectual property."

Ha ha yeah, my ass.

What Google has just done is to license PPP from Microsoft. Nice job.

Don't believe me? Read this.

All the "Activesync Protocol" is, is good old PPP.

and do not forget http://mojo.handhelds.org/ has already ported Ubuntu to ARM; Icy aka Intrepid Hasty aka Hardy Grump aka Gusty for the ARMv5 and ARMv6 instruction sets.

Last year, the folks at http://mojo.handhelds.org/ already ported Ubuntu to ARM. They have:

Icy aka Intrepid
Hasty aka Hardy
Grumpy aka Gutsy

all built for the ARMV5 and ARMV6 instruction sets with and with out VFP support.

Try http://mojo.handhelds.org/

Uhhhhhhhh, Gnash has been in the last three Ubuntu distros, and http://mojo.handhelds.org/ has compilations of Gnash, so you can indeed run Flash on ARM.

Check out this page. It looks like they've already gotten Linux to boot on the x50v, and the x51v. Doesn't Ubuntu already have a version for sub-netbooks (handhelds)? I can't wait to dual boot my Axim!

Yes, actually the only advantage here is corporate support Ubuntu has already been ported to the ARM: http://mojo.handhelds.org/

(my HTC Wizard does fairly well with a 195MHz processor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Wizard [wikipedia.org] imaging what it could do with a 1GHz Atom).

Really? I also have a HTC wizard, and the embedded windows mobile really sucks.
Mobile IE is totally useless, the wifi networks interface is very incomplete and sucks.
Active sync is totally resource intensive.
There is little you can do with mobile Office.
In all the windows mobile default applications, only the mail client does the job.
Besides useless applications, the windows mobile kernel is always crashing.
Looking to non-default applications, Mobile Opera its very cool but it totally nukes the device memory after a while.
This is totally unacceptable in a device with WIFI/GPRS/EDGE/IRDA/BT/USB.

But anyway, Linux on the HTC Wizard (http://linwizard.sourceforge.net), which I'm one of the project admins/developers, does a much better job. You can have GPE
http://familiar.handhelds.org/releases/v0.8.2/install/dl-gpe.png
qtopia
http://wiki.openmoko.org/images/e/ea/Qtopia002.png
or even the openmoko
http://www.palminfocenter.com/images/palm-tx-openmoko-2.jpg
running on it.

The wifi and bluetooth drivers are still missing and the GSM driver is incomplete. With some programming love on them, the wizard would be a much better device.

More usefully: I see there's Familiar Linux for ARM-based WinCE handhelds - a tweaked Debian for ARM - but it doesn't appear to have been updated for a year.

You'll love to read what I thought about my Windows Mobile 2003 SW device:
http://dotancohen.com/eng/dell_axim.php

However, I understand that Linux has been ported to PDAs and it's no better that Windows Mobile. Worse, actually. Here is the project: http://handhelds.org/

You can run Linux on it, too.

But the biggest problems I have with it is that I've had mine repaired twice in one year, there is no VPN software that does not cause it to reboot spontaneously, and the Linux that runs for it has no wireless support (of any kind). Other than that, it's been pretty handy for me. I hate the fact that Palm has all but stopped development on the platform and hasn't come out with their new Linux-based platform yet. I would really like to be able to run something like Octave or Python or Kismet.

Not your macbook. That's a huge label to get robbed in a lot of countries.

This has likely been brought up (I'm at work and don't have time to read on the comments) but one of my old bosses wanted to be able to administer his windows machine at home and also be able to do all his regular stuff on it as well (pop email, etc) so he wrote a program for his wirelessly enabled handheld that did basically the same thing as what VNC will do.

My suggestion is just set up a linux box runing `vncserver` (Mac probably has a vncserver, too) and get a good handheld device: Something with a color screen with enough processing power to play MP3s/OGG/FLAC and a vnc client (familiar linux can run on a number of iPaq models. I'm sure there's better solutions, however). You'll need a friend that can run your linux box for you to help keep it going and I'm sure you'll have to play with resoltuions on the server to be legible on a handheld.

If the handheld screen is just too small, you could do the same thing on something old and crappy enough that you wouldn't mind parting from should it come to it.

Fortunately, you are wrong :)
It is not GTK+ that's the platform, GTK+ is just a GUI toolkit. You should take a look at GPE and GPE Phone Edition.
And also take a look at OPIE, a Qtopia fork.

I don't know what white papers you are talking about, but if I were to build a phone, I wouldn't want any other kind of software on it, other than open-source that is. And that's because I would get total freedom to modify it in any way that suits my needs. And I would get a great community behind me (too bad Trolltech thought to cripple its Greenphone with that awful licensing).
And that's especially important in a market with multiple hardware platforms, and with huge resources limitations.

And also ... lets not forget that JavaME was also crippled by mobile carriers ... that's why I don't give a damn about what they say.

I run Familiar Linux on an IPAQ pocket PC that has phone capabilities. The problem with these devices is finding a decent carrier in the US. Cell phone markets tend to be anti-competitive in the sense that third party devices are often excluded. For example, I bought a Treo-650 from Sprint but when I switched to Cingular I had to buy another phone because the one from Sprint doesn't work on Cingualr's network.

For example, the HTC universal is a closed proprietary device, and getting linux working on it has been an uphill struggle for the dedicated team working on it (and they have achieved wonders - kudos to them!). Check out their progress on UniversalStatus.

Even the Sharp Zaurus, until recently one of the few handhelds which came with linux out of the box still has proprietary/closed-source elements - the SD driver is one example. One of the biggest missing pieces of the jigsaw is an accelerated video driver for the Zaurus SL-6000 series - there's a Toshiba TC6393XB chip for which virtually no documentation is available (it also drives the SD card slot, so presumably Toshiba didn't want to release the programmers guide for fear of giving out information on that somewhat proprietary standard).

See also this thread, which gives some numbers on how long it would take to perform 100000 erase cycles. Note that at least CF cards usually have wear leveling built into the controller on the card, so you don't need to use a special filesystem to get it.

Three things:
1. Some phones come with processors in the 400 MHz and up range. (The Greenphone the GP references runs at 312 MHz, btw.)
2. I would imagine if built for an ARM processor, which a lot of these phones are, the RISC processors would actually run KDE a bit faster then your old 400 MHz processor.
3. On PDAs running Linux, we have Opie and GPE. Why do we need KDE?

As something on the side, what kind of 400 MHz processor are you using? Despite what Intel used to like us to believe, the processor speed is not everything.

Three things:
1. Some phones come with processors in the 400 MHz and up range. (The Greenphone the GP references runs at 312 MHz, btw.)
2. I would imagine if built for an ARM processor, which a lot of these phones are, the RISC processors would actually run KDE a bit faster then your old 400 MHz processor.
3. On PDAs running Linux, we have Opie and GPE. Why do we need KDE?

As something on the side, what kind of 400 MHz processor are you using? Despite what Intel used to like us to believe, the processor speed is not everything.

Here is a thought, I don't know if it will work for you or not but worth a look anyhow.
Grab a couple of iPaq's on ebay. Used or last years models and reload them with OPIE or GPE and off you go. Cost you little, get a lot, support the penguin.

Just a thought...

Here is a thought, I don't know if it will work for you or not but worth a look anyhow.
Grab a couple of iPaq's on ebay. Used or last years models and reload them with OPIE or GPE and off you go. Cost you little, get a lot, support the penguin.

Just a thought...

As cool as it sounds, Linux on Motorola Smartphones essentially is NOT an open platform.

Motorola doesn't encourage or support native application development. They tell you to use Java. Some parts of the phones are completely undocumented (e.g. the GPS part of the A780). Access from Java is possible but not native access (OK, hackers built an Java proxy as a workaround, but the point is that it is not officially supported). You don't get access to built-in phonebook, etc. pp.

It took months before someone managed to telnet into the A780 and it took months to telnet into the A1200 (yes, they protected the A1200 even harder). The toolchain for building native apps would still be in its infancy if the official development kit from Motorola hadn't leaked somewhere.

For my A780 there is exactly ONE native application: CoPilot, the navigation software that comes bundled with the European version of the phone. And that's about it.

So these phones could be SOOOO cool. Think of Opie on them. Perfect! Nothing but perfect. But Moto doesn't get it. Like a lot of the major vendors that use Linux but are of no help for the community.

If you are interested in helping out, check out Motorola fans (forums --> development ; you need to register btw.). You can find a lot of How-Tos and downloads there. And some guys are working on a 100% open source kernel that works on these phones. Their homepage is here. For kernel hackers this is supposed to be a lot of fun ...

Bye egghat.

Although it's an eensy bit larger than a m505, you can get a used iPAQ (or a newer one) and put Familiar Linux on it. My iPAQ H2210 gets about that much battery life, you can put linux on it and get linux connectivity that way, it has SDIO and CF Type II, it's got bluetooth and I have a CF wifi card. You can get one that has all that, plus internal wifi, and vibration too, but you'll need a CF to SD adapter if you want to use two SD cards. Sure, Linux on a handheld isn't much different (in practice) than linux on a desktop, except the scale, but I did install it on mine just for a laugh (it wipes out the contents of your handheld, so you have to back up, run it, and then restore from the backup if you want to run both on the same device) and it was slow to boot, but actually quite peppy once it booted. 64MB RAM is pretty sad for a desktop, but not bad for a palmtop running Linux. In fact, right now the linux connectivity is working, and the windows connectivity isn't. The handheld wouldn't even peer with my windows laptop, but both machines can see my cellphone, so I'm not sure what's up with that. My handheld isn't officially supported until next month or so anyway.

Haven't all these manufacturers heard of GPE, Opie, or even Maemo? Those ought to be easily adapted to run on phones instead of just PDAs.

I think the real reason they're all going proprietary (and not providing SDKs) is because the service providers don't want there to be an easy way for anybody but them to make applications for the phones.

Haven't all these manufacturers heard of GPE, Opie, or even Maemo? Those ought to be easily adapted to run on phones instead of just PDAs.

I think the real reason they're all going proprietary (and not providing SDKs) is because the service providers don't want there to be an easy way for anybody but them to make applications for the phones.

We use Familiar as the basis of our distribution. Familiar is nice because it leverages most Debian-ARM packages, so you don't have to do very much compiling, and most of the build system is scripts and easily compilable programs.

I've personally ported the entire Familiar system to another architecture, too - PowerPC (IBM/AMCC 405 series), and Debian-PowerPC for the most part works. Took me a couple of weeks to create the port, which involved repackaging a number of Debian-PowerPC packages for size.

The ability to leverage a normal Linux distribution, especially Debian (there aren't many distributions that have the immense number of architectures as Debian) saves a LOT of time. Recompiling sucks.

Here are some links - I did a lot of work on the build process.
http://download.intrinsyc.com/supported/iso/i-linu x/

The PowerPC one is similar to the 4.x releases, 5.0 is ARM only but uses a later version of Familiar, so you'll want that.

"NetBSD will you a run for your money with that statement: http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/ "

NetBSD doesn't run on things like this http://handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/DellAximX50 It probably could be made to, but it doesnt. And gems such as this http://openwrt.org/ It might list the CPU on your page, but it just doesn't support the pieces of hardware I listed. Oh, and while I was looking around on that page on www.netbsd.org, the site went down, no more responses from the webserver. I'm serious, I could ping the site, but got no webpages from it, just that site others worked fine (and netcraft's 'refresh now' returned "We could not get any results for your selected site."). How about that as an example of reliability?

If BSD is so greatly designed, then why all the forks? Why isn't there a single BSD that is good at everything? Free/Net/Open... Needing so many forks is just a show of bad design. BSD is better engineered than Linux my butt.

"as an aside I'll also note that among NetBSD's ports, there's the International Space Station."

Running an OS on a PC104 stack is not a port, it's just a (embedded) PC version. There is no PC104 or PC104+ SBC out there that doesn't run Linux.

But wanna boast about being in space? Your link says the NetBSD is to be launched in 2000... Debian Linux was on the STS-83 space shuttle mission back in April 1997.

http://linux.org.mt/article/space and http://www.faho.rwth-aachen.de/~matthi/linux/Linux InSpace.html

And this http://www.sheflug.co.uk/featuresoft.htm Linux flew a testflight on STS-80, and is intended to be used for something mission-critical as docking, not just gravity measurements. (http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/12/Linux_on_t he_International_Space_Station.pdf)

NASA didn't do projects like http://flightlinux.gsfc.nasa.gov/ this just for fun... NASA chose Linux not BSD for Beowulf back in 1994 for a reason.

"Are you taking this fact to mean that Linux wasn't originally developed for the PC?"

I'm taking point with the statement that Linux was made by lowly 'PC hackers' while the BSD pedigree is made by the great 'Unix hackers'.

It's an example of the baseless elitist environment of BSD that shuns away so many.

BSD would get a lot more acceptance if the fans and developers would come from cloud nine back down to earth.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-clo1.htm

Hate me for pointing out a MS product

If Google releases a Linux GTalk under GPL, the rest of us can make it work on other hardware. Like a Treo running Linux.

GPE does X and portable Gnome applications. You can use Dilo, which works better than the IE you describe, or mini mozilla, which is slower but resizes images and does other cool stuff. Xstroke gives you full screen graffiti and is the best handwriting recognition I've ever seen. The PIM stuff is supposed to sync with Evolution.

Opie is it's own mini KDE environment and works well. It's supposed to sync with multisynk, but also imports the normal kontact files with ease. Embedded Konqueror is not as good as minimo, but it works well enough. The interface is mature, stable and good.

The built in MMC slot is well used by both, and you can run both at the same time on Zaurus.

Cheers, you don't have to wait for Apple to give you a PDA.

You must be kidding me. Linux runs just fine on my Zaurus CL-860, and that has the same specs (roughly) as the proposed MIT laptop. 400Mhz XScale, 128 NDRAM. I can run full Firefox, Abiword, Gnumeric, GIMP, XMMS, and many other apps. And the system i'm running is bloated compared to the original one because its intented to act more like a desktop than a PDA.

Negroponte should have a discussion with the people at Sharp, the folks over at Open Embedded and the Linux embedded community in general before spewing nonsense like this.

There are more than enough embedded Linux project around that show just how well suited Linux is for projects like this.

Saying Linux is too fat is like complaining that there are too many pieces in an erector set. You don't have to use what you don't want to.

Exactly. Have those people compiled a kernel lately? Did they notice the modular design and the way you can strip out a lot of things you don't want?

I run Linux on a 206 MHz handheld with 32 megs of RAM, off a 512 MB flash-card. I use Familiar as a distro and Opie for a desktop environment. I have IR, Bluetooth, Ethernet and WiFi connectivity, I have Opera as a browser and a whole lot of software I can't even begin to name (ipkgfind counts 35,000+ packages).

So what's with this complete bullshit about Linux not being fit for a 500 MHz/ 128 MB RAM machine? Negroponte didn't even support his statement in any way, that phrase you see in the Slashdot summary is all he said in the article too (serves me right for RTFA).

Don't get tricked into thinking about the regular desktop distro and how to slim it down for the 100$ laptop. There are established handheld distro's out there for which the specs of the 100$ laptop would be an upgrade, that's what they should go with. Think bottom up, not the other way around.

OpenEmbedded has exactly what he wants. My Sharp Zaurus C-1000, running OpenZaurus (built from the OE build system) has: a real x server, pretty desktop icons, gaim, abiword, gqview gaim, sylpheed, some games, an ebook reader, gftp, firefox and some other programs. All this takes up ~90MB flash. Also, the system is fairly comfortable to use even with only 64MB of RAM. I did setup swap on an SD card but that only gets hit when firefox and something else are running at the same time. With 128MB of RAM and a leaner browser (galeon or epiphany maybe?) I don't see a reason to use swap.
If I was interested in a lightweight, maintainable Linux distro for this project, I'd make sure that the OE devs got hooked up with a development system (or :gasp: even *hired* to put prioritize OLPC support). Just my $.02 -Mr. Lizard

I'll be there ... so instead of flaming me on slashdot, you can flame me in person! Oh, wait, nobody ever flames f2f. I'll be in the Handhelds.org booth at least party of the time. Sorry, no T-shirts to give out. Hold your own hand.

There are filesystems specifically developed for solid state storage, have a look at:

JFFS2 and YAFFS

They are being abandoned anyway since most flash drives have built in levelling system (this menans that almost any filesystem is ok).

OPIE, a linux distro for handhelds device, use JFFS2 for SecureDigital cards .

There is already one filesystem that try to address this issues, is the JFFS. Its used by the Familiar Linux distribution, aimed at iPaq handhelds.

If this photo is correct (looks a little bit strange), the device runs GPE, a pretty nice handheld interface used by several linux handheld derivates and based on GTK+. Since GPE uses a real XServer, porting applications is quite easy (you can even run them remote), as opposed to OPIE, which uses the framebuffer directly. Nokia's maemo platform has many similarities to GPE, I hope that both projects profit from each other.

If this photo is correct (looks a little bit strange), the device runs GPE, a pretty nice handheld interface used by several linux handheld derivates and based on GTK+. Since GPE uses a real XServer, porting applications is quite easy (you can even run them remote), as opposed to OPIE, which uses the framebuffer directly. Nokia's maemo platform has many similarities to GPE, I hope that both projects profit from each other.

If this photo is correct (looks a little bit strange), the device runs GPE, a pretty nice handheld interface used by several linux handheld derivates and based on GTK+. Since GPE uses a real XServer, porting applications is quite easy (you can even run them remote), as opposed to OPIE, which uses the framebuffer directly. Nokia's maemo platform has many similarities to GPE, I hope that both projects profit from each other.

I'd say 3 hours is about what I'd expect with WiFi on, and maybe playing music. For reading an ebook or browsing off-line, I get a lot more.

There are lots of third-party apps available (cf http://maemo.org/maemowiki/ApplicationCatalog). However, it's a bit weak on standard PIM stuff like addressbooks and calendars. The choice I know about is , whose PIM apps have been ported to the N770. To my mind, it is a bit odd that Nokia shipped the thing without a full-featured addressbook and calendar pre-installed; they seem to really want to distinguish this product from traditional PDAs. (To my mind, the gorgeous if small 800x480 landscape-orientation screen does that quite well enough. :-)

Yeah, they'd probably use GPE.

Or perhaps I should say "obvious news". If you can easily run Apache, SSHd and others on your PDA running Linux how hard can it be to do the same on a mobile phone ?

1. How well does it (or do you think it would) function as a PDA? Does it have calendaring apps and stuff? How well does it sync that sort of data with a PC? What sort of software will it sync with?

Out of the box, it sucks. GPE PIM applications have been ported. They don't currently do very strong on automagical syncing front, the folks working on them posted a progress report and updates yesterday and mentioned it's the next step being worked on.

3. From the Maemo tutorials, it looks like it uses some mix of a special API (the Hildon stuff) and GTK. How difficult is this to learn (I've done GUI programming with the Win32 APIs and have a very rudimentary knowledge of Qt, but almost no GTK knowledge) and how much knowledge is transferrable to making desktop GTK apps?

Knowledge is almost 100% transferrable to desktop GTK.

Is it possible to use something like Qt on it?

Qt as an addition isn't very likely, two heavyweight toolkits on device this small will drain way too much RAM. The only way I can see that happening is if you completely wipe out Maemo and use a hypothetical Qtopia/OPIE port instead.

How's the handwriting analysis? To compare, Windows Mobile gives you a virtual keyboard you can tap on the keys, an entry area that you use like the older Palms and special glyphs, and full screen recognition that tries to do it from your natural writing. It seems from the site that it has something like the first and last modes; is this accurate?

That's right. Haven't used Windows Mobile not a clue how good it is, but handwriting recognition is better than any open source implementation I've tried, although vastly inferior to Windows XP Tablet PC edition. Virtual keyboard is pretty good.

It says it's Linux-based... do you have command line access, or just a GUI? If you do have a CLI, is it useful?

Well, considering the text input methods CLI is pretty much a pain to use, might be useful with bluetooth keyboard or something.