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Royal daVinci Linux Project
jsinnema writes: "According to Andy Surber (CompanionLink) at PDA Buzz Royal, Royal is trying to put as much into the Linux powered Royal daVinci as possible and still reach the target price range of $199-249. As memory prices change on a regular basis, so does the final specs. As it sits now, they are heading towards a product with 16 ROM and 32RAM (subject to change). The device should also have a compact flash slot, which could also provide additional memory. The product will be based on the Tosiba MIPS processor." Looks very vaporous right now, but if its real, it looks sweet. Kurt the Pope just got WinCE based HP Jornada 548, and now I'm super impressed with PDAs again (although it is only 12-bit color and was until recently advertised as 16). Between this DaVinci or maybe the Yopy, hopefully we'll have a Linux PDA soon too.
I don't know anything about EPOC it may be as bad, but what I know about PalmOS makes me amazed at how stable the apps under it are. And it makes me lery of wanting to try to write my own!
EPOC (as far as all the press goes) is a fully moderm, 32-bit pre-emptive multitasking, multi-threaded OS. The OS is based around a tightly coded kernel, with a window manager (EIKON in the case of my Series 5) designed to run on top of it. The way I understand it, the window manager is easily changed (more on this later), but no manager other than EIKON is currently available. The OS has inherent memory protection, and I believe all of its predecessors did as well (16-bit Psion OS's). The result is a platform that is as stable as, if not more so, than Linux. I've heard tales of individuals not restarting their Psions for a number of years, and months is very common. Even with using a large amount of home-grown software (my own included), I have never had to hit the reset button to stop a rouge app. In fact, using the built in OPL interpreter, programming on my Series 5 is easy, and I have access to almost all of the system functions through API calls. There are very few things (multi-page dialogs for one) that aren't readily available to the home programmer. The only real problem I've seen with EPOC is that if an app dies horribly enough, there may be a slight memory leak. (can you tell I'm an EPOC advocate?)
As to the description of the OS, this reminds me a good bit as to the setup used in Linux. A tight kernel (that can have support for unecessary items left out at compile time), with a windowing system on top. I think that using Linix on a handheld device can be a Very Good Thing (TM), if done properly. The trick with using any handheld is that your apps come up quickly, and you don't have to fool around with the OS much unless you really need to. The problem therefore becomes a pure UI design issue. This has been discussed elsewhere on this page, so I will rant no longer.
You can check out more about the EPOC OS at: http://www.symbian.com
What CmdrTaco didn't mention is that the original Royal daVinci PDA came out a couple of years ago. They provided almost no customer support, missed their release data for the software developer's kit by several months, and have ignored hundreds of e-mails about people not being able to sync their daVincis to desktop computers.
Then they got sued by Palm for steal parts of the PalmOS. They decided to redesign the machine and its operating system. They moved from a Motorola 68EZ328 CPU to a 12MHz Sharp CPU - unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to play with the "revised" (actually totally redesigned) model. The original was similar to the PalmPilot in functions, but with fewer options.
About a month back, I dropped my daVinci and the screen died. (I might be able to fix it, but haven't had time yet.) Due to Royal's history, I'm going to either wait until the new daVinci is an established product with good support from the user base or just a Palm instead.
-Ender
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
Not quite completely off-topic: Why isn't there a CF TV tuner card for my PDA? Is there some technical limitation I don't know about? It doesn't seem that difficult.
MSK
The "linux-base PDAs" don't even qualify as vaporware: they are vacuumware. To my mind, a workable Yopy or equivalent is at least three to five years away. The nature of the OS kernel won't help much one way or another, although using an OS designed for a small device makes life easier. The truth is, creating a PDA is much harder than anyone imagines until they get into it.
The key thing to understand is that, despite how it's sold, a PDA is a consumer device, not a business device. So you get into all of the oddities of trying to second guess the real consumer marketplace. The user is making a <shudder> style statement. The device must be more like a toaster than a computer. It has to turn on instantly: when the user punches the on button, the screen must show up within 500 msec. You have to worry about cultural conventions -- Americans like design x, Europeans like design y...
The applications on the device don't have to be "simple", but they have to be convenient and "intuitive". UI design counts a lot -- if your UI doesn't "make sense", consumers won't spend $500 to carry around in the palm of their hands. If you support a feature, it has to "just work". Configuration has to be driven by the program itself asking questions. Don't even think about "text-based, editable config files." They won't work.
Can it be done? Of course. But it won't happen anytime soon. It takes the kind of monolithic maniacal management that commercial firms do well...and OSS does poorly. That means spending big big money, and I can't see anybody getting funding to do it adequately. The market is already defined, and without the kind of money the MS can throw at it, you're not going to break in.
It sets the low bit of the closed "database" so it is an invalid word/dword pointer. If you do any of the Db calls on it you get a bus error, but only because the pointer is mis-alighed. If you do a Db call on it and some other app has it open (or left it open) it goes through.
If you stored a pointer in a variable too long and then use it, the write goes through.
If you store a pointer, and then overwrote part of it, the write will go through.
I don't know if the DragonBall indicates user vs. supervisor state, but the memory "contoler" (chip select control, and RAS/CAS strober) is all built in. So unlike a 68000 system where you need to put a PAL (or descrete logic) in anyway to do all that crud, and can slip in a very simple memry protection unit (like the Amiga WCS, or the ST's "system area"), the DragonBall does not let you ride that stuff in for free. Not because it makes anything more expensave, but because it makes not doing so free, and $10 vs. $9.75 is easy to pay, but $10 vs. $0 isn't so easy to justify.
Except if you do a Find. Or a few other similar things (but you don't get the "globals register" set, so you have to run in-stack only, and many OS calls are unavailable. There are also shared libraries, I'm not totally clear on how they work in PalmOS (didn't read that chapter yet), but they implment TCP/IP (and UDP, PPP, and ICMP) in a shard lib, so it has to have some sort of premption ability. The IR stuff is also a shared lib.
I don't know anything about EPOC it may be as bad, but what I know about PalmOS makes me amazed at how stable the apps under it are. And it makes me lery of wanting to try to write my own!
On the other hand, if I could bear to lug around the YOPY I would be all over writing apps for it. But man, oh man, cell phone, GPS, and a big-ass PDA is a lot to carry. Even the Visor (Pilot sized PalmOS Pilot clone) is clunky.
I know that I, and most /.'ers would *love* a Linux PDA, but let's think if it's really necessary. Why shoehorn Linux in everywhere we can find an IC? I think that better efforts could be put into improving the connectivity between desktop linux and PDAs.
I don't know where it's all heading, but this whole "world domination" thing feels a little wierd to me. Is Linux really the answer to *every* question?
World Domination is either achieved by force (Microsoft, or Castro) or by simply being better (e.g. capitalism, in it's original form). Let's be better with Linux. I'm not saying don't put it on a PDA, but let's think first.
We really, really need to make Linux into something more than just a more stable and free version of Windows.