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The Joys Of Porting
Gambit Thirty-Two writes "Old news, but Sendmail has ported their MTA to Linux390." And in other news: sitz writes "It would appear as though some madman has port apache to WinCE <Insert witty beowulf comment here>. It's only been tested on a couple of platforms (including the Jornada 720, and is 'based on the WinNT port, with lots of dirty modifications'. That's still pretty swanky. I've also set up a mirror of this site, which will be up for a couple of weeks." Update: 08/27 15:19 PM GMT by H : Yes, the Sendmail story is a dupe - somebody didn't read my story before posting his. *grin*
Yup, I already read it somewhere. If I would remember where, I would post a link to it.
Censorship on Slashdot
Is that Sendmail bit really so important we have to read it twice? In a row?
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
BTW: does anyone have any info on getting an abacus to use wireless ethernet? I thought linksys made an adapter, but I can't seem to find one at BestBuy...
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
At work here we have the MSDN Subscription, and we have all the MS software. (but no games) 3 binders full of cd and this does not include the 2 for technet and 1 for marketing.
One day I was browsing thru the cds and found, "SQL Server for Windows CE"
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
It's fun. And a cool hack. Some of us get into that sort of thing. Really, what's the point of porting a server OS (such as, say, Linux) to a Palm Pilot? Palm OS is already perfectly good for running a Palm, so why do the port? Because it's fun.
Best Slashdot Co
Is anyone else here really bothered by the fact that there is no close parenthesis in the story. Just for my piece of mind I have to post a )
-no broken link
What's the point of running a server on a device that spends 99% of it's time not on a network?!
If God gave us curiosity
The WinCE apache thing, but then it hit me.
It isn't about the general type of web server that we know and love. It's about a portable transaction platform!
Imagine that you are a salesman, contractor or other individual who travels and does business with many different people in many different places. If you had a 802.11 (I don't think bluetooth will make it) enabled Jornada or iPaq, then you could cary a web-based transaction server with you, wherever you go. You wouldn't need a fixed IP, nor a constant broadband link to the internet.
You could hop on to your client's wireless LAN, or establish a peer-to-peer link to make your transaction server (e-business whatever) appear local to your clients. They could do business with you, and you take your web-site and data with you when you leave. In this way, you could use a near universal interface (web browser) to handle customer interactions, without having to scrawl all of the information in by a flaky pen-based interface.
This would be a very cheap way of doing business, with less threat of being cracked by some script kiddie.
-- Len
It might be useful on an Agenda, if it had a cellphone or wireless to a local net. Information from rounds, sales calls, what not, could be formated and displayed as HTML to those interested. A webcam might also be interesting. Why not? Also useful would be SMTA. Breaking that last mile looks like fun that way.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Easy! I want a free (speach and beer) graphics viewer and editor. I would like to use a PEN to draw instead of a mouse. When I am bored, I can doodle with it and make doodles that may be worth something. Many MANY uses for this type of thing.
What may even be cooler is if someone could put a zoomed in portion of the graphic your editing on the Pocket PC screen and the full size one on the regular CRT (of course this is while it's connected via active sync) and I edit the zoomed in one and see the changes on the full sized one....cool eh? I think someone did this with one of the color pda's out there, but I am not sure which one.
Gorkman
Which is what we'll get soon with version 4 of this crud. Wouldn't it be better to have a relatively bugless web server?
I've been running apache on my Cassiopeia for almost two years, i didn't know it was such a big deal! It was a nice way to step into connectivity on CE (apache having such decent docs and so many hackers at bay, it's a pleasure to port it) and also allows me to use my palm browser to browse pages dynamically. Useless? Naw. I can get an XML file from the Bentley manual to my Volkswagen and feed the information for a repair into pocket apache, then serve the info inside the file (including some SVG gfx) at a decent enough speed into my broswer. In a ten to fifteen page repair, i'd otherwise have to print everything out, thus wasting paper and creating a solution that won't last one oil change. Now, I just zip the palm pc in a freezer bag and BAM! Pocket Mechanic.
And for those of you naysayers out there, no, there isn't a paper manual for my engine, just the (poorly) encrypted XML version on CD.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
My initial reaction to the various servers ported to PDAs was "Why???". But the more I think about it, the more potential I see for it.
The biggest gain would be the elimination of proprietary synchronozation software/protocols. Right now, if I want to access my address book from a PC, I have to hookup the cradle (which requires a free serial or USB port, assuming your machine has functional USB support) install the sync software/drivers (assuming you're running the right OS) and then synchronize (which copies everything to the PC, which might not be a good idea if you're sync'ing to a machine at work).
Instead, say my PDA was running a mini-LDAP server that was acting as a front-end to my address book. Outlook, Outlook Express and Netscape Messenger all support LDAP, so any of them would have immediate access to my address book.
Of course, this all assumes your PDA is capable of Ethernet or 802.11.
An FTP server running on a PDA would be perfect for moving files. A web server would be able to serve up your notes, todo list, etc as HTML, complete with editting forms.
One snag I see is that you might not be able to run multiple servers on a PDA at once. In that case, you would need a universal protocol to piggyback everything on top of, such as SOAP running on a web server, then you would just need some SOAP based APIs, and software that could understand them. Hmmmm.
I can see how this would be useful... When the next generation palm/visors come out you'll be able to get a wireless card, dynamic ip addy and a web cam and throw the whole getup into the women's locker room...
I mean... No, no, that's exactly what I mean...
Cool. When I get an extra thousand bucks I'll go get one (gotta have a BIG CF card too.....)...but I won't put Linux on it until later. I need a map program. Pocket Streets 2002 kicks major booty since it's one of the few that has nice looking maps and now GPS support. Linux has little chance of supporting decent looking maps like in Pocket Streets becuase of the copyright issues that most mapping programs have. There may be ones out there, but I haven't seend any yet. Map programs are something I'd pay for on Linux. Imagine I am running a windows laptop and it blue screens when I am lost! ARGH!
Gorkman
Yeah that's only part of the puzzle. It's easy to grab the NMEA info and parse it to produce the coordinates. Plotting them on to a map is a different thing. You got to have both the map data and a way to plot those according to the map's datum. Nice to see ths support, although it's just a serial connection....nothing special except maybe the parsing of the data. I noticed he's using Python which would be perfect for just this thing!
Gorkman