Can the HP Jornada 820C Run Something other than WinCE?

!TorpedoBay asks: "I am looking for an OS to run on an HP Jornada 820C - want to get rid of the CE thing. I know this is a 16MB ROM machine - is there any way to replace this OS with PalmOS or with a stripped down Java OS ala Espial or something else? How hard is it to replace the ROM chip in these devices anyway?"

Comments

Re:Should I tell my date that I am a virgin?

[ksheff]

no...save yourself the angst...wait until your married.

Re:Well...

[LWolenczak]

In such a case, that bios would have to praticly be a OS :) perhaps Linux be the BIOS.... I wonder how the linuxbios ppl are doing

Probably not PalmOS

[FroBugg]

AFAIK, PalmOS will only run on the Dragonball processors that are in all the Palm and PalmOS devices. Unless someone's created a port for it, it won't run on what you've got.

However, there's probably a Linux out there that'll work. There's a company called Agenda that's making a Linux-based pda with a look that is somewhat similar to Palm's, running on a 66MHz NEC processor. Maybe they'll be able to help you out.

You also might want to check out some of the software dl sites for pdas. I know I've seen some ROM replacements for Palms, but I haven't done much looking when it comes to WinCE devices.

Well...

[StandardDeviant]

It does say the rom is user upgradeable. So if a project doesn't yet exist to munge that rom space, it should be at least possible. It looks like pretty standard hardware (VGA, strongARM, the modem is probably hardware b/c I doubt that machine has the horsepower to do realtime DSP that's needed for winmodems to work), so in theory looking at the specs it shouldn't be impossible.

Side thought: you know what would be cool? A pda/small-ass-pc-thingy that not only used a boot rom but had a TFTP bios-boot/running-update option (just slap a NIC in the PCMCIA slot and go, or use the modem if you're out-of-office). This would make wholesale corporate updates easy as pie and allow easy backups of of the rom images in case any rollbacks are needed. Plus this has been done many times before so it's a solved engineering problem (cisco routers spring to mind as one example).

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Re:Well...

[!Squalus]

Cool. I haven't opened my Jornada just yet, but I am going to try to get that going. I find the base OS annoying and there ought to be a way to get an IBM 1" Microdrive (1GB hopefully!) in there to make this thing run. The Screen may be an issue (don't know yet) - but I would like to get that going (I have a Pocket Ethernet Adapter already - I guess Mozilla would be my browser of choice unless I ran Konqueror). Anyone want to start a project to do this?

links

[Garc]

I have some links for you:
The linux sh3 homepage, they specifically list some Jornadas.
The linuxce webpage is down, but the faq is still up, as is the mailing list.
The linux sh homepage.

Some of this may not apply to you, I just wanted to give you a good place to start looking.

garc

Re:links

[!Squalus]

Thanks for the links - looks interesting. Really valuable information there!

Linux CE

[danpbrowning]

I have a Jornada 820 too. I followed the Linux CE project for a few months anxiously waiting for them to change the message on their home page:

"No, stop asking! We do not have Linux CE working on Jornada 820's!"

If you ever get *anything* besides WinCE working let me know. danb@cyclonecomputers.com

other than WinCE?

[jpellino]

Somebody could make a lot of friends by starting with the PalmOS emulator(s) and porting THAT to run on top of the WinCE the same way I run the PalmOS emulator on Mac or Win... Since this is way above my technical threshold, I'll leave the implementation as an exercise to the reader...