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Linux On The Dell Axim
An anonymous reader points to this interesting project to run the Familiar Linux distribution on the Dell Axim. "It includes a picture of the Axim running Linux and directions for loading Linux on the Dell Axim from the CF card. Looks like a good start to this project." It's limited for now (crashes after 15 minutes, must be loaded through the installed version of Windows), but everything starts out that way.
In a way, it's kind of useful from an advocacy point of view. We can truly say that we have an operating system that scales to virtually any device, large or small, and can run on virtually any processor technology. Linux runs on anything from PDAs and small embedded devices to IBM mainframes today. You can't say that about *any* of its competition.
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Admittedly, while NetBSD *does* provides support for a wide range of processor platforms, it's still not as scalable as Linux, and hasn't been ported to nearly as many devices in a useable form. Not that I'm trivializing NetBSD -- it is very scalable and runs on a lot of stuff -- but Linux is a lot more versatile thanks to the support of a lot of dedicated developers and the commercial support given to them from big companies like IBM.
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We've seen Linux scale from as small as wristwatches to mainframes (both courtesy of IBM, oddly enough). So porting Linux to any particular handheld with an MMC is almost blase now :|
Now if only they could make it usable beyond 15min...
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
Walking around a campus checking signal strength with something like this is real nice.
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Well, currently, there are HP employees (researchers, formerly Compaq, formerly DEC employees) helping with making it work on HP iPAQ units. This helps the iPAQ porting efforts go quicker than ports to other company's handhelds. However, the product cycle time on iPAQs seems to have gotten pretty short recently, and we're having troubel keeping up with the model families as they come out (54xx support is appearing, 19xx bootldr work is in progress currently).
Dell doesn't exactly provide info for these projects. Most of this is entirely reverse engineered (which is partially why WinCE is still needed to do HW init, but also as a bootstrap in this case). I'm amazed he's managed to get a kernel booting, let alone OPIE running!
Why just don't you get Zaurus SL-5600 ? Same hardware as Axim and it has keyboard!
The most important is that your money go to company
supporting Linux on PDA!
When you buy Axim - your money goes to Dell and Microsoft and neither of them suport Linux on PDAs!
There is so much talk about no Linux notebooks
- here you have a very good Linux option,
why don't you support it ?
"with that kind of hardware the sky's the limit."
With that kind of hardware, the battery is the limit.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
No, I haven't used Linux, but a great many argument I've read and agree with have to be usability and nativity to the platform. If Linux isn't native to anything, then who uses it on what? When will standards be developed?
Au contraire! Linux is native to *every* platform it runs on.
It's important to note that the Linux kernel, along with the pieces of GNU system that you need to run with it (gcc, glibc, GNU toolchain, etc.) are written in C, which is a mostly portable language. Some parts of the kernel were written in assembler, although I *think* that has changed, and those parts originally had to be ported to each processor, but again, I think this has changed.
In any respect, Linux is ported to each processor it runs on. Most of the work done in porting Linux to a new platform involves porting gcc and glibc, and then optimizing the kernel and those pieces to run well on that platform, including doing obvious stuff like moving from 32-bit to 64-bit, little endian vs. big endian, etc., but other things including optimizing for the way that that platform handles memory, for instance, optimizing pieces that are timing critical, and writing device drivers for different pieces of the I/O system, etc. (I've never done the work myself, so if I've missed something, hopefully someone more capable than myself will point that out, but this is basically the process as I understand it)
So there you have it...Linux is native on every platform it runs on.
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