Is the Agenda VR3 Linux PDA Dead?

An Anonymous Coward writes: "LinuxDevices.com has published a news item about the uncertain future of Agenda Computing and their VR3 linux PDA. According to the article, some members of the Agenda developer community are continuing work on current projects, but many have switched to other projects such as the Sharp Zaurus. Apparently there is an Agenda Germany office which is still shipping the VR3s (including to the U.S.) and which has said that they are continuing VR3 development -- but's not clear whether that means software or device development. Looks like another cool linux device has bitten the dust. Sigh."

Comments

Linux

[tsa]

I don't know. Do you have to buy a device because it runs Linux? Maybe there are better OS-es for PDA's.

Why are people surprised?

[not-quite-rite]

How was this groundbreakingly different, and what did it offer over any other PDAs.

Any product that tries to cash in on the "Linux is cool" will find that people are looking for substance, not gimmicks.

I doubt there were many people that considered it a serious player in the world of PDAs.

I am not saying this to start trouble, I believe it just needs to be said.

Re:Why are people surprised?

[ProfessorPuke]

I've got an Agenda (although I waited until the price had dropped more than 50%). Strangly, the resolution and monochromeness were both selling points for me! The resolution is better than a Palm (160x240 vs 160x160, due to no Graffiti area), and monochrome means much better battery life.

However, their hardware spec was still hugely flawed. Some of the more obvious deficiencies:

• /dev/dsp: They built in sound hardware (input and output!), with a port for a nokia-style earmike. But to this day no useful software has used it. An mp3 player isn't too much fun when you've got maybe 3 megabytes storage free.
• too small: It's SMALLER than most Palms! That sounds like an advantage, but the fact is, the customers for a Linux device are going to be geeky hackers, and willing to look like a nerd for hauling around a huge brick of hardware. If the Agenda had been slightly bigger, not slightly smaller, then there may have been room for AA batteries (much longer life), more RAM, more flash, or who knows.
• not enough memory: Here's the memory on my unit: \w\$ cat /proc/meminfo total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached: Mem: 7798784 7487488 311296 0 0 729088 Swap: 0 0 0 MemTotal: 7616 kB MemFree: 304 kB ... 8 meg is adequate. I guess. Barely. If they could've bumped it up to 16, the device would've been much more useful. Today hardware hackers enjoy pulling apart SIMMs to solder in this upgrade themselves- if its that easy, the factory should've done it.
• not enough storage: Same deal as the RAM. Had 8, should've had 16. Most of the 8 was already exhausted by kernel, /bin, /usr/bin/X11R6, /usr/bin/games, etc. With 16 flash, the out-of-box device would've come mostly empty, instead of mostly full, which is a world of difference. Many Palm users felt decieved when they found that the advertised "8 megs of storage" wasn't all usable for their contacts and appointments. Here's the stats:
  \w\$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/mtdblock0 3.3M 212.0k 3.0M 6% /flash
• Replaceable batteries: You had to unscrew the case to change the AAA batteries, rather than being able to slap it in the dock every night and never think about losing power, like you can with many Palms and PocketPC units. That would've been an especially important advantage for a device whose usefulness come from software hacking. You want to plug it in, export DISPLAY=workstation:0, and beging to code, without worrying that operating the serial port drains batteries faster than normal unplugged operation. This problem reduced the convenience of developing new software for the Agenda, which thus reduced the benefit that a Free Software operating system should've given them.
• No USB: USB is cool, what can I say? A USB port could've not only handled the recharge problem from the same plug as the data, but it would've had better bandwidth too, and not require a nonstandard serial-port adapter. And imaging if the PDA could emulate a USB mass-storage device to export its filesystem to random PCs you meet throughout the day (kinda like the Terapin Mine, but that's a $700 system).

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. If they'd done just 1 or 2 of those rather simple improvements, they could've justified the higher price to average users.

Re:Why are people surprised?

[trampel]

As far as I know, it is the **only** PDA offering a full X Server. While causing somewhat more overhead, it makes porting software much easier - heck, you even can use it as an X Terminal!

While "Linux is cool" shouldn't be the main seller, there are connectivity aspects that simply blast other OS's away. For instance, when I got my Agenda plus Ethernet interface, it was lacking dhcp capabilities. However, I was able to compile and run dhcpcd out of the box - try that with a Palm or Windows CE based device.

Then, the software useability for basic PDA features is actually very decent in the recent releases.

Re:Oh well, a lesson learned

[Peter Harris]

You know, he could have been referring to Freedom rather than sale price...

Good reasons for using a free OS on a hand-held are going to include:

• Freedom from proprietary content-control mechanisms. If these are built into non-open hardware drivers you're fucked. You might as well not buy the device in that case.
• Weird hardware hacks that the designers didn't anticipate e.g. interface to Lego Mindstorms GPS-targeted siege engine ;). Again, you need free access to low-level drivers.

So maybe no ranting required.

Re:Oh well, a lesson learned

[DocSnyder]

Is it that you don't think the programmer should do everything for free, or is it that you can't afford any really nice software?

You don't understand the difference between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech. It's the latter which is important GNU/Linux PDA users, not if GNU/Linux or a different free-as-in-speech system is running on the box.

That doesn't mean that GNU/Linux on PDAs is free-as-in-beer. When I bought my iPAQ last summer, the preinstalled GNU/Linux distribution was priced about 40 or 50 €, and I didn't have any problem paying for free-as-in-speech software. I would of course have been able to flash my PDA, but as I hadn't done it before and flashing the bootloader bears the risk of "bricking" a PDA and making it unusable, it was a fair deal. Apart from the preinstalled iPAQ I got a CD with all source codes used for building the GNU/Linux image, even a cross-development environment (binary packages + source + build scripts), everything.

It would be a good idea for Agenda to have a similar business model with commercial free-as-in-speech software, too. That's what GNU/Linux users are looking for.

Not a total dead loss ...

[LL]

... there's already some interesting ideas coming out of the VR3 project ... offhand I can think of that Snow ABI which considers building apps in a different way to be more memory thrifty ... unlike a PC with virtual memory, a PDA is severely constrained with no guarantee that a wireless connection will be available. Some of the ideas could be extrapolated ... for example, if you have a transmeta chip, could the ABI refactor themselves in memory (ie reorder libraries to drop non-used portions?) What about mechanisms to detect dead code or where the memory/code hierarchy changes (think reconfigurable chips hibernating in spare memory slots as one HK uni research group published).

I mean, we evolved from the dwarf binary format to elf ... perhaps we need to consider next generation hardware advances to .... ummm ... create the hobbit ABI. Think reconfigurable. think non-linear memory, think small embedded devices that can join together in a single complex task, think auto-optimisers/refactors a la JIT.

LL

Re:Not a total dead loss ...

[Jay Carlson]

Yeah, the VR3 is a fun lab for exploring the pressures on embedded Linux devices. For instance, 8M is not quite enough memory for the software that people want to run on the device. So we want to cut down memory usage, but before we can do that, we have to understand what exactly memory usage is.

That's a difficult issue. Take a program that has no heap/stack usage. How much memory does it use while running?

One 4k page, containing either the current instruction, or the target address the current instruction is loading. All the other pages can be dropped by the kernel VM system, and demand-loaded back in when needed. Plus whatever kernel overhead there is to support the task and memory maps.

OK, clearly that's not a useful answer. Any real app that's really eating only one page is thrashing so hard that it won't get anything useful done in a timely manner. But it does get you thinking about what the nature of memory usage is, and possible ways to reduce it.

eXecute In Place support is one strategy. When you build VR3 compressed rom images, you can flag some files as sticky. Through the magic of VM, those uncompressed files are mapped directly into processes, and their code really does run from ROM---no copy in RAM needed. But VR3 ROM is slower than RAM, and you use up more ROM space this way. VR3 hackers have spent a lot of time exploring the tradeoffs here. But there are plenty of other strategies, and some that go deeper into the build process.

For instance, it would be nice if each code page had as much useful stuff on it as possible. If you have a short "hot" function, a long bunch of rare exception handling, and then another short "hot" function, you have to keep the exception handling code paged in even though you're not using it much. It would be better to reorder the hot functions so that they share a page.

You can do some of this with gprof's function reordering profiles and some linker scripts, but I haven't gotten around to trying this on the VR3. I think that some of the approaches to small-device tailoring do require the deep, system-wide approaches the parent article describes.

Note to future PDA companies

[DrXym]

PDAs don't sell very well if they ship with a half-baked OS and the expectation that your customers will fix it for you.

From the developer community

[VertigoAce]

As a company, Agenda Computing USA is long gone. The office in Germany (Agenda Computing GmbH) still exists and is finacially a distinct entity. They are still developing software and even accessories that weren't available from the US.

The community itself is currently debating the best way to move off of Agenda Computing's servers (which are likely going to disappear without notice in the next several months). Once the community switches over, all of the software can be maintained by the community.

Other people, such as myself, are working on Linux-based PDA software that is platform independent. PicoGUI, for example, runs on the VR3, the Helio, PC's, OS X (I think...), and several embedded systems. With this kind of development, the success of the software does not depend on the success of any particular piece of hardware.

Nothing to do with LINUX

[SerpentMage]

I think this has nothing to with LINUX. And the GPL is good because how often has it happened that good code was lost because the company went under.

The problem with palmtops is that I have tried and tried to use them. But what I keep going back to is the smallest leanest notebook possible. And many other people think the same way. A Palmtop is in many ways a "toy".

Re:Nothing to do with LINUX

[dr_labrat]

I know what you mean...
I recently dusted off my libretto 50...

Runs linux like a charm :)

Severe Usability Problem

[heretic108]

The biggest problem with marketing Linux-based PDAs is the miniscule software catalogue.

I'm not referring to the wide range of GPL'ed Linux applications that work on Linux PDAs (read: can be possibly made to work with reduced features after 'just a bit' of massive re-architecting and 'just a few' 36-hour porting/hacking/debugging sessions). I'm talking about the tiny pittance of ready-to-run pre-packaged apps, compared to the thousands of apps already available for Windows CE/Pocket PC and PalmOS PDAs.

While I'm a fan of Linux and Open Source, I have to acknowledge the catch-22 problem of trying to capture market share for Linux PDAs when Microsoft and its PDA minions - Compaq, HP and Casio etc, are barging their way in with the support of huge R&D and marketing budgets - and attracting the attention and efforts of legions of corporate and independent software developers who smell the $$ and cut their code, confident that they will recoup their development costs and make a profit before their apps end up on the warez/crack sites, Morpheus, Gnutella etc.

Growing software catalogues feed bigger hardware sales, and vice versa.

The moral?
If you want to push a new hardware/OS combination into the market, all you need is a few billion dollars behind you, and allow some time for the developers to get on board and feed your credibility with a software catalogue before you *have* to turn a profit.

Re:That's a bummer man

[ProfessorPuke]

It ALWAYS could sync with Linux, because any two linux machines can sync with each other if they have serial ports, pppd, and rsync!

If that's not enough for you, then its Free Software, so go and write your own improvements. The only financial reason that a company should try to sell their hardware with Linux (aside from the kewlness factor) is to reduce their software developement costs, because the user community will step in and do it for free.

(That said, their fatal mistake was that starting to program was too hard- it needed too much hackivation energy. They released the source code, but as a mismash of patches to other projects. If they'd let users download a single tarball which built into a kernel and full set of executables, their software deficiencies would've been fixed faster, and maybe they'd have survived to this day)

Financial problems and an unfinished product

[Johku]

The parent company of Agenda Computing, Kessel International Holdings, had severe financial problems. The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong suspended trading in Kessel shares on 23rd May 2001.

Agenda US was said to be "temporarily closed" because Agenda Germany (Agenda Computing GmbH) as an independent company was planning to establish an office in US (which would have become the new Agenda US). Apparently they were never able to come up with sufficient funding for that (at least not yet).

This is what we have heard from an ex Agenda employee Shane on the Agenda mailing list (I hope I got it right).

The financial problems might have been one reason why they started selling Agenda VR3 when it was still way too unfinished as a product. But there were also some technical problems such as not having enough available RAM. It made it harder to quickly come up with usable set of PDA applications. I guess it was the result of trying to push for a too low price point.

Anyway, I continue using my VR3. It is a nice device and certainly has been one step forward for Linux PDA devices. I am just sad that the step didn't carry very far.

Re:That's a bummer man

[trampel]

NOT TRUE.

I'm happily using an Agenda, and syncs with Linux (gnomecard and gnomecal) quite well.

Admittedly, earlier versions of the synchronization programs had problems, though.

Agenda died because it was premature...

[GKChesterton]

Agenda's problems had nothing to do with linux and its fitness or lack thereof for PDAs. It died because it was pushed out the door before it was done. They weren't done with the OS, they weren't done with apps, and they weren't done with the hardware. It was pushed out the door because of the financial difficulties of Agenda's parent company.

Actually, with the latest kernels and romdisks, the Agenda is a pretty nice device for the low end of the PDA spectrum But its not consumer-ready and probably never will be now. But it could've been. I use it as my everyday PDA currently. But I also have a Zaurus and will probably switch to it once I have a few spare cycles.

A bigger issue I have with Agenda is that I don't think the target market was a winner. I don't think the low end of the PDA spectrum is where a business wants to be. Its up at the high end with the iPAQs, Jornadas, and Zaurus where anything interesting and profitable would be happening.

Re:Oh well, a lesson learned

[Jay Carlson]

Their code base was not all GPL

No, it isn't all GPL; a lot of it is covered by the LGPL and X11 licenses. :-)

Seriously, we have the source to every bit on the device. And I mean Open Source. It did take some effort to get the X11 sources, and source for the PMON boot loader, but we have them all. I know this because Brian Webb, who isn't an Agenda employee, rebuilt everything from source to support my snow ABI, which is not binary compatible---if it wasn't rebuilt, it wouldn't work!

We're still working on automating the rebuild. Right now, doing this rebuild is a manual process, but I think we're a few weeks away from having a big "make World" that will spit out a cross compiler and then a romdisk image.

Now, if you're fretting about PDAs with components that aren't Open Source, go check out the Zaurus. Its Java implementation is proprietary. (If you want to write apps for it, they have to be GPL'd unless you're a Troll licensee; I guess some people see that as a positive thing.)

and the device was expensive

$250 always seemed a touch high to me. I think there's a Linux PDA niche somewhere below the iPaqs, competing directly with low-end Palm devices. LinuxDA is a little too low end for my taste; I want virtual memory. I would think that had Agenda's parent company not stumbled, pricing on the VR3 would have come down.

I don't remember an NDA on their developer pages.

(I wish people would stop moderating articles with "overrated/underrated" just to avoid metamod; the parent is at score 3 with no moderation reason. And the parent msg is substantially incorrect.)

Re:Severe Usability Problem - possible solution?

[Dr. Manhattan]

The biggest problem with marketing Linux-based PDAs is the miniscule software catalogue.

Some people have looked into porting POSE (the Palm OS Emulator) to the Zaurus and other Linux handhelds, so that it could run Palm apps. Unfortunately, POSE needs a Palm ROM image, and those are not freely redistributable. You'd need to have a Palm anyway to get it to work. And the speed would likely be atrocious on a 200MHz ARM chip. It's not full speed even on my K6-II 500MHz.

I had a different idea. The Palm SDK's are available, and there's prc-tools and such for Linux. Why not create an emulation layer for the Palm API, like Wine emulates the Windows API on Linux?

The Palm API is better-documented, and much simpler. It'd probably be fairly easy to get to at least Palm OS 2.0 or so. Then you could recompile Palm apps for a Linux PDA. There would be a speed hit due to redirection, but the underlying processor is much faster; overall I'd think there would be a speed boost.

You'd still need to recompile, but there are lots of open-source Palm apps, and lots more developed with Linux; the developers might have good motivation to quickly port their app to a new platform.

I think the endianess is the same, so that's not a problem. To be legally safe there might need to be a clean-room effort, I'm not sure yet, but this'd be a way to get a lot of apps for, e.g., the Zaurus, and quickly.

forget the Sharp Zaurus

[markj02]

I have developed software for the VR3. It's a nice little device. Because it uses standard Linux GUI software, I can now take my software and run it on several other Linux-based PDAs.

The Sharp Zaurus only runs Qt/Embedded. It will not share the screen with any other toolkit, and if I develop for Qt, I may end up having to pay steep licensing fees. Thanks, but no thanks. The point of Linux is that software is compatible among different Linux machines/devices and that I'm not forced to use just the software that some hardware vendor decided to impose on me.

Here's why agenda got it's butt kicked

[Ukab the Great]

• It had a risc processor that was almost four times as a fast as a palm's cisc processor, but responded to user-generated events almost three times as slow. This is probably do to the fact that the linux kernel does not prioritize handling UI events whereas PalmOS does. It is probably also due the fact that PalmOS doesn't try to do serious multi-tasking because something like a PDA really doesn't require it except for a few limited daemon-type things (e.g. alarms, timers, etc). Sure, if it does serious multi-tasking, geeks can run apache on it. But then you have to ask yourself who you're really marketing the product to.
• The Agenda did not remotely have any serious human factors involved in the hardware design. Most likely they said "we'll design the hardware first, and worry about the interface later on". You can clearly see this from the strangely placed buttons and the ultra-slippery metal stylus that is ultra-hard to get a good grip on. Any UI person worth his salt will tell you that you should always come up with how the person is supposed to interface with the software/device before you ever write code/manufacture it. On a PDA, usability issues are amplified several thousand times: On a sit-down desktop, you might have half a day to navigate a poorly designed interface. With a PDA, you might have 20 seconds to get down a damned important phone number.
  
  The Palm, on the other hand, was invented after the designer carried a block of wood around in his pocket for a month, pondering what the PDA should act like. Agenda Computing could have used a good block of wood.
  
  
• The user interface was badly designed. The calendar on the agenda was nowhere near as good or as clean as the palm's. And where the palm had a global area for looking over the applications (i.e. home), Agenda made it into an application called Launchpad. File managers should have the feel of being a global entity, not an application that has to be started.
• Agenda's web site really didn't contain a whole lot of information that was helpful and only contained a few pieces of documentation here and there. There seemed to be this attitude of "if you want help or support or information, check out the agenda community". When you're a company, you just can't say that. Also, Agenda should have put all the developer community apps on their web site. People don't have the patience to follow links.
• Agenda prevented reselling, but did not provide things of as great a quality as a reseller might (if at all). For example, if someone were allowed to beef up the consumer IR software, to add a whole bunch of IR codes for various consumer devices, and make it generally easier to use and then sell it as the Ultimate Universal Remote, people would have gotten a kickass remote and Agenda Computing would have still made money of the hardware, which was their original business model anyways
• Agenda couldn't really decide who their target market was: end-users who wanted an organizer or linux geeks with a lot of patience and a love for futzing who wanted a cool toy. You always have to know who your market is if you want to succeed in any kind of business.

Linux PDAs need to set themselves apart...

[SwedishChef]

One of the reasons for using Linux is its versatility. If manufacturers want a Linux device to take off, they need to put some of that versatility into it. USB, Ethernet, and a standard expansion port would have made a big difference in the success of the Agenda.

Developers "switching"

[dstone]

From the article...
some developers have now switched to other projects such as the Sharp Zaurus

"Switching" from one Linux platform to another? It's a little ironic that part of the demise of this Linux PDA is something that can't/doesn't really happen to Linux on the desktop and is actually something that keeps the community together -- developers don't usually have to pick and choose which distribution/hardware/etc their Linux apps will run on.