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Palm OS To Run On Linux
mwk88 writes "PalmSource today announced it is acquiring China Mobile Soft, a leading Chinese mobile phone software company, and will offer future versions of Palm OS Cobalt running on Linux. Full disclosure: I am a PalmSource employee -- but also a Slashdot reader, and would like to get some feedback. You can find more detail in this letter to the Linux community." NewsForge (also part of OSTG) has a textified (non-PDF), linked version of the letter.
There's a textafied version underneath. This guy was kind enough to consider us people who dislike adobe/acrobat.
*yeah, yeah, we know we don't have to use acrobat, there are billions of readers out there, blah blah blah*
Two questions on the tip of my tongue were answered outright and the section gives good perspective on the angle company is taking. From the article:
My suggestion: scroll down for the good stuff. It's at the bottom of the article.
Of blankness, I know nothing.
From the article it's clear that they are basically using Linux to replace the previous kernel they used. They're porting PalmOS as a layer on top of a Linux kernel instead of whatever it was they had before.
Hopefully it will mean a sane development environment for new apps (threads!), while still providing a backwards compatible mode for existing apps.
" Linux is a trademark owned by William R. Della Croce, an individual, and previously owned by Linus Torvalds, the originator of the GNU code of the same name." wrong! The Linux Trademark suit (1996-1997) Though this has been tried again in other countries, the definitive case over the trademark on "Linux" happenned after an individual named William R Della Croce, Jr of Massachussets fraudulently trademarked the name "Linux", claiming he had made the first use of the name in 1994. Nobody noticed until he sent threatening letters to WGS of Aurora, CO (Linux Mall), Yggdrasil of San Jose, CA (first maker of a Linux distribution on CD) and others. The Linux community provided ample evidence that this was not true. The resulting lawsuit was settled with the trademark being assigned to Linus Torvalds. Right!
There is already an excellent cross platform, Open Source PalmOS synchronization solution that runs on Linux (and Mac OSX and Windows and OS/2 and Solaris and everywhere else) called the jSyncManager.
It has all of the necessary APIs for synchronizing calendars and accessing the handheld Expansion Manager and Virtual File System.
What it needs it some more jConduit plug-ins written for accessing popular Linux applications. However, it has an extensive API and is licensed under the GPL/LGPL, so Palm (or anyone else) could very easily create a Linux-integrated synchronization tool if they so desired.
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project.
Yes. ::raises hand::
For about ten minutes, every executive wanted one to replace their paper-based Franklin Daytimer, but now it seems that everybody uses their cell phones to do 90% of what they actually used their Palm computers for (address book & schedule reminders), and everybody just brings yellow legal pads to meetings when they want to pretend that they are taking notes and paying attention.
Integrating phone functionality with PalmOS is a priority at PalmOne. Handspring made the (possibly ill-conceived) announcement that it would "only be developing communicators" (PDA+phone devices) shortly before being absorbed by PalmOne. The Treo 650 is widely regarded as being a good device, though I've heard some rumors about poor voice quality.
For me, the holy grail would be decent voice control, a Bluetooth headset, and still no buttons/keypad on the device so it can have more screen area.
It's been about three years since I've seen anybody take notes on a palmtop in a meeting, and if somebody did they would probably be laughed at.
I take notes at meetings using one all the time. Nobody laughs... ;-)
No current phone except the Treo has the horsepower (CPU+memory) of a decent PDA. I'm actually ambivalent about adding phone functionality due to the additional battery drain. I guess the alternative is vastly improved battery technology. For me, the beauty of a PDA is having a computer with me constantly - which translates into an infallible memory plus lots of powerful and entertaining capabilities.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
In the project that I'm on, I've pushed for (and successfully gotten) Palms used for interfacing to the electronics in the project. They're far, far more useful than laptops for simple interfacing stuff (anything that can be interfaced with RS232, or nowadays USB). Cheaper, more rugged, much more visible in sunlight, and more importantly, far easier to use. Ever try typing on a keyboard in sub-freezing weather with high winds? Uck.
(On a side bad note, do try to keep Palms slightly in the shade. The screens tend to darken significantly with heat from direct sunlight).
Palms have been used for
and lots, lots more. To be honest, part of the reason that I bought a Palm for my own personal use is that I wanted to support them. A cheap PocketPC device is $150. A cheap Palm is under $100.
Plus, really, who wants to program for a Windows device? Palm even has a Linux programming chain, and a Linux simulator for Palm OS.
Regarding their software, it looks to me as if their software didn't grow to fit the ARM hardware as fast as it should have, due to the extent of 68K assembler programming in their original platform. Linux is part of their path out of that.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Here's how I solve the problem: replace Graffiti with TealScript. Unfortunately, it's ridiculously expensive for a Palm app, but I love it because I can actually use my own writing, which is actually very minimalist and original-graffiti like anyway -- but different enough that it was driving me crazy. And slowly, Graffiti was destroying my own handwriting. TealScript let me get it back. It's shareware, so you can try it out first (indefinitely, if you're into that).
You know, multisync on Linux handles the Palm fine, and the Palm protocols are standards-based. It seems to me the problem is on the Windows side, possibly in Palm's sync software on that side but definitely on the Windows side.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Since Palmsource neglects to document ANY of their changed APIs in the applications, every byte has to be reverse-engineered from scratch. I think we've done a pretty amazing job at creating what exists today, given that we've had NO help, NO docs, and FEW devices to work with.
This kind of reverse-engineering requires real devices, the simulators (which are Windows only, forcing us to buy Windows licenses, just to reverse-engineer an undocumented protocol, so users can sync their Palm devices on Linux).
These devices cost money, lots of money, since every vendor has proprietary extensions which require special handling (Sony has photos in the Addressbook, Palm has cross-midnight calendar functionality, etc.) Since none of us get paid for our pilot-link work, or any Palm synchronization work on Linux for that matter, there isn't a lot of incentive to fund these $400 devices every few months.
And if you had actually read our mailing list, you would see that SD cards work fine now, but Birthdays aren't supported yet, because there are bigger things to address in the codebase first, like working around the chip-level bugs in the T5 and Zire31 devices.
The code for the new Contacts API is already in CVS, but there is nothing in userland to talk to it yet. Its coming, just not right now. I'm not going to introduce any new functionality until we figure out all of the bugs and issues with existing functionality first.
And lastly, pilot-link is the project that comes up with all of this code, from scratch, with the help of some very talented developers. Anyone else who claims compatibility with these devices on these platforms, is using our code in their projects. Period.
There is a BIG HUGE difference between being able to distinguish from among 50 or so spoken commands and names, and being able to do natural English continuous speech recognition. The first was perfected a decade or more ago. The other is not perfected yet.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."