Like MacOS X, you can have the best of both worlds on a PDA: - Take PalmOS for good PIMs, price, battery autonomy, speed, - And grab lots of OSS ported to PalmOS at www.palmopensource.com
(And in a few months, Palms will have a real OS, derived from BeOS: PalmOS 6)
> I chose it for functionality, not freedom (whatever) or > sustainability.
Right. When I had to replace my old PalmIII, I took a look at all linux PDAs. But I finally decided to buy a Palm Tungsten T for many reasons: - Linux PIMs are so poor, that you'd better use vi to manage your contacts, - Support for hardware in SD/IO will probably never be available under Linux (because of patents, it seems), - I needed integrated bluetooth, - There's a lot of OSS ported to PalmOS: visit http://www.palmopensource.com - Sharp and GMate do not have the experience of PalmOS and they tend to forget that more than 3 hours of autonomy is mandatory for a handheld.
But if one day I could install Linux on my Tungsten (with BT, SDIO support), I would be happy.
Yes, it's exaclty what it thought when I saw that news: why would you need yet-another-card-standard, when SD I/O is here ? You already have SD cards which have: bluetooth, 802.11, cameras, fm radio, GPS, scanners...
I've dropped my HP48 and I now use a Tungsten T with - Power48, an open source HP48 emulator, when I need to do complex things - EasyCalc, under GPL, for everything else (95% of the time).
I costs a little more than $200 but you can play PacMan with XCade, have an open source C compiler (onboardc), amd much more (bluetooth)...
You can find more open source calcs here: http://www.palmopensource.com/index.php3?ca tegory= 18
Moreover, Reasoning's ( http://www.reasoning.com/news/pr/07_01_03.html ) source code analysis of apache was not very convincing (31 defects => 7 real bugs, see http://www.apacheweek.com/issues/03-07-11 ). So how could they make a better analysis tool without software's source code ??
On Palm, you already have very good *open source* graphing calculators such as EasyCalc or even an HP48 emulator (Power48). Just take a look at www.palmopensource.com. So I think there's no need to release a Palm Calculator. Moreover a large touch screen is much better than a small screen and a real calculator keypad.
Yes and open standards are cool but open doc is *much* more better. For example, it's impossible to find decent documentation about Texas Instruments OMAP 1510 processors (ARM core+ TI DSP) which is found in some Palm PDAs !
TI, I want open/free documentation ! Not pseudo open standards !
Yes but its size (120x80mm) is like any other PDA. So it's cool to have so much features in the same space as before. (But for the weight, it's twice other PDAs:-( )
> And most important feature of a Palm : I can use it with my desktop linux box !!!
And you have lots of open source software at www.palmopensource.com , and an onboard c compiler (OnboardC under GPL) !
To be exact, the 'hello world' I'm talking about, is one with a graphical interface, an 'OK' button, a menu bar with quit,cut,paste,and about items.
This example takes 1.4KB in PalmOS.
It takes 100K with XLIB, 250KB with Gtk and 350KB with QT (memory only, i'm not taking into account the hd space...)
Do not forget that PalmOS is at the present time, certainly the most open OS for palm-sized devices. You get full free programming documentation, compilers, and even source code of some parts of the OS and embedded applications. Moreover it's easy to port a Linux
application to PalmOS.(you have berkeley sockets:)
And the number of GPL/Open Source applications is still growing: Take a look at:
Slashdot Mirror
Like MacOS X, you can have the best of both worlds on a PDA:
- Take PalmOS for good PIMs, price, battery autonomy, speed,
- And grab lots of OSS ported to PalmOS at www.palmopensource.com
(And in a few months, Palms will have a real OS, derived from BeOS: PalmOS 6)
> I chose it for functionality, not freedom (whatever) or
> sustainability.
Right. When I had to replace my old PalmIII, I took a look at all
linux PDAs. But I finally decided to buy a Palm Tungsten T for many reasons:
- Linux PIMs are so poor, that you'd better use vi to manage your contacts,
- Support for hardware in SD/IO will probably never be available under Linux (because of patents, it seems),
- I needed integrated bluetooth,
- There's a lot of OSS ported to PalmOS: visit http://www.palmopensource.com
- Sharp and GMate do not have the experience of PalmOS and they tend to
forget that more than 3 hours of autonomy is mandatory for a handheld.
But if one day I could install Linux on my Tungsten (with BT, SDIO support), I would be happy.
> The embedded industry is moving towards SD/MMC
...
Yes, it's exaclty what it thought when I saw that news: why would you need yet-another-card-standard, when SD I/O is here ?
You already have SD cards which have: bluetooth, 802.11, cameras, fm radio, GPS, scanners
...And with EasyCalc you have 320x320 color graphs ! Who would pay so much for ridiculous 128x80 b/w graphs ?!
I've dropped my HP48 and I now use a Tungsten T with
a tegory= 18
- Power48, an open source HP48 emulator, when I need to do complex things
- EasyCalc, under GPL, for everything else (95% of the time).
I costs a little more than $200 but you can play PacMan with XCade, have an open source C compiler (onboardc), amd much more (bluetooth)...
You can find more open source calcs here:
http://www.palmopensource.com/index.php3?c
Moreover, Reasoning's ( http://www.reasoning.com/news/pr/07_01_03.html ) source code analysis of apache was not very convincing (31 defects => 7 real bugs, see http://www.apacheweek.com/issues/03-07-11 ). So how could they make a better analysis tool without software's source code ??
On Palm, you already have very good *open source* graphing calculators such as EasyCalc or even an HP48 emulator (Power48). Just take a look at www.palmopensource.com .
So I think there's no need to release a Palm Calculator. Moreover a large touch screen is much better than a small screen and a real calculator keypad.
Yes for OMAP 5910, there's documentation, but for 1510, 1610, ... nothing but marketing data sheets.
Yes and open standards are cool but open doc is *much* more better.
For example, it's impossible to find decent documentation about Texas Instruments OMAP 1510 processors (ARM core+ TI DSP) which is found in some Palm PDAs !
TI, I want open/free documentation ! Not pseudo open standards !
GSM is far from being open, so why using it for open platforms ???
Yes but its size (120x80mm) is like any other PDA. So it's cool to have so much features in the same space as before. :-( )
(But for the weight, it's twice other PDAs
> You couldn't use the Palm's USB link for the internet connection...
/dev/ttyUSB[0|1].
Yes it works with my 2.4.20 ! You just have to launch pppd on
I get more thant 100KB/s of http transfer rate via ppp via usb.
> And most important feature of a Palm : I can use it with my desktop linux box !!!
And you have lots of open source software at www.palmopensource.com , and an onboard c compiler (OnboardC under GPL) !
...and the htb.init script.
r ceforge.net/projects/htbinit
http://luxik.cdi.cz/~devik/qos/htb/
http://sou
This example takes 1.4KB in PalmOS. It takes 100K with XLIB, 250KB with Gtk and 350KB with QT (memory only, i'm not taking into account the hd space...)
And PalmOS is the most open OS for palm sized devices: you can find the source of built-in apps and some parts of the OS too.
And for more open source palmos apps, visit, www.palmopensource.com
And the number of GPL/Open Source applications is still growing: Take a look at:
http://www.palmopensource.com (the PalmOS open source portal).