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Psion May Look To Linux For The Next Big Thing
An anonymous reader points out this "interesting interview with Psion founder Dr David Potter. It explores the reasons why Psion sold their share in Symbian to Nokia and why Potter believes that there is good future for Linux on "compact" notebooks and the like. Guy Kewney is a very well respected commentator on technology, he's been doing for a long time and I've always found his insights to be pretty spot on.
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As long as the framebuffer/console video support worked properly this wouldn't be a bad idea. I mean to the end user, why would they care if their Unix-alike handheld had a Linux kernel or a BSD kernel?
Functionality is the key, not the license the OS is distributed under.
-Rusty
The Master (Angelo Rossitto) in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, "Not shit, energy!"
Psion has real, studied experience at making handheld products. If they were to sit down with Linux and attempt to adapt it to a product appropriate for handhelds-- meaning in an APPROPRIATE USABILITY sense, not meaning in a "uhh X will start on it" sense-- the result would be an extremely valuable asset from the perspective of the Linux community.
-- Super Ugly Ultraman
Why does every damn "linux runs on $HARDWARE" screenshot have a half-naked model as the desktop background? Corporations are not looking to see if something will assist one in being a DOM (dirty old man).
Hmmm...
More like
60's == Computer Science boom
70's == IT and second CS boom
80's == PC Boom... Microsoft popularizes shrinkwrap EULAs... dark ages begin. Real comp sci pushed into back rooms of academia.
00's == 70's technology explodes from academia into PC industry... 80's era corporations fight to return to lucrative IT dark ages.
It has been clear since the late 1990's that Linux in its many variations represents the future of the operating system as a technology.
There is of course a huge vested interest in trying to delay and/or stop this process, but it is - obviously, to me - already unstoppable. We are watching the elimination of all incompatible operating systems one by one, much as we watched TCP/IP eliminate a slew of different network protocols in the 1980's and 90's.
Linux is portable and can quickly operate any new system out there. Any vendor using Linux thus has access to a pool of applications that is already large, and growing.
Linux is stable so that applications built 10 years ago still run easily. If I can run Apache on my PDA it's not because someone sweated blood and tears to strip the code down. It's because the OS has done its job.
Linux is open, meaning that no single group can divert it into suboptimal directions. We all know how commercial interests often conflict with basic operational efficiency. Free of these conflicts, Linux is already incredibly plastic, and becoming more so. Beowulf. Knoppix. Technologies made by one or two people, able to change the basic rules of computing. Impossible with a commercial OS but natural with Linux.
Linux has, in essence, demonstrated that the "operating system" as a problem has been solved, and well solved. People will still pay for their OS software for a long time to come, but now it is down to attrition. Windows will conquer no new platforms, not a single one. Linux will take them all, one way or another.
So, Linux for hand-helds (and BTW, I deeply covet those Psion Netbooks) makes perfect sense, but not because of anything to do with the handheld format. Linux makes sense for the hand-held for the same reason that TCP/IP makes sense for the hand-held. How else are you going to do business in the 21st century?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Functionality is the key, not the license the OS is distributed under.
I couldn't agree more. I'd like to go a bit further, though, and say that functionality on a wide variety of handheld and embedded devices also means modularity, even down to the level of the kernel.
I'm not dissing Linux here, but from what I've seen so far, Linux still has a pretty large footprint until you really start hacking (in the machette sense of the word).
The closest I've seen to what I consider ideal is QNX which has a micro-kernel that is inherently modular. Use only what you need and even swap portions in and out at runtime if necessary. However, QNX licensing, last time I checked, was pretty damned steep and the developer seats were outta sight for a small-time developer.