[kwlug disc.] Linux on Palm? AccessLINUX?

[Chris I]

On Sat, 2007-02-10 at 19:58 -0500, Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:
> As a long and loyal Palm user (my first Palm was the Palm Pro), I am really 
> doubting my next PDA will be Palm.  It won't be WME though, as it will 
> probably be running Linux.

I'm in the same position. I have a Palm T3 currently. I actually enjoyed
my Vx much more than my current T3. It had longer battery life, and was
much smaller and lighter. As the feature-tradeoff, I can now watch video
(probably cuts battery life to <1h), and a larger, heavier device that
does not have a decent hard-case (it pops out of the hard case due to
there being no top). 

OS-wise, aside from the ability to play movies and pretty blue title
bars, the Calendar, Address, and ToDo applications have undergone no
improvements to this day from as far as I can tell.

> > Where's 'ACCESS Linux Platform' / Linux on Palm, at these days?
> 
> Somewhere between "Wouldn't it be nice if" and the release date of Duke Nukum 
> Forever.

I say we just wait until we have handhelds that run the Hurd. :)

Access Linux platform is apparently available for developers, but a fair
chunk of the system is closed. It looks pretty, though. Check out the
link below to see 'function block diagram'. A large portion of the
system is proprietary.

 http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4018299974.html

The other option is openmoko. I think this has been linked to in the
past, but they recently opened their development. Recently as in
'between you posting your message, and me posting mine.' Though it is
apparently far from ready.

 http://www.openmoko.org/
 http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/announce/2007-February/000004.html

The above solutions are probably aimed at new devices, however.

I go the above information from a blog:

 http://www.figuiere.net/hub/blog/?2007/02/14/500-linux-phone
via:
 http://planet.gnome.org/

> > Not ready to just flash Linux on it and be good to go?
> 
> http://www.hackndev.com/ and http://www.shadowmite.com.  A lot of unofficial 
> work, and good progress all around.

I was curious as well, so Thursday night I installed the unofficial T3
packages on my Palm T3 from following links on the hackndev site (there
are no official packages for this model). It is fairly painless to try,
all I needed is an SD or MMC card. Instructions are pretty broken up,
but basically I downloaded the components in a folder called
'/linux2ram/' on the card, and the launcher to '/PALM/Launcher/'. You
then run Linux like any Palm application, though with a few notable
differences:

	1. This will wipe all data in your palm. Calendar, applications, OS
updates. Everything. Back it up.

	2. Everything takes a while to boot up. Give it five minutes or so,
even if it appears stopped.

	3. When running, there is a 'Reboot to Palm OS' launcher. This will
hard-reset the device, and the palm does it's little recovery. If you
can not get it working properly (you will not on the first try), you
will need to hard-reset yourself.

	4. SD cards suck. My T3 has a 400MHz ARM processor, but if you set it
to run anything faster than 133MHz (configurable in the Launcher
application) you get read errors and a hung system. I bought an
MMCmobile card with an MMCMobile to MMC adapter today. Initial playing
around looks like a decent speed boost.

	5. You can not turn the device 'off'. More accurately, you can not
suspend the device. Resuming from suspend would require "flashing the
smallrom", which is considered dangerous and may brick the device. I
guess there are some recovery methods, so I may look at this during the
weekend. So you have a short battery span. On a side note, Linux
reported proper battery information (~50%) while Palm has always
mis-reported this as 100% (leading to long 'full-charge' times, with
sudden dropoff)

	6. It is slow. No amount of exaggeration could actually express the
extreme lack of speed while in use. Now I am freely willing to admit
that I may have incorrectly configured something. And that these are
experimental builds, probably with some sort of logging. And that these
are _unofficial_ builds (not even hosted on their site).

	7. If you run Doom, note that you have no keyboard... or input of any
kind during the game. Hard reset to get out...

	8. Some applications (Calendar) do not run, while others (Todo) show
what looks to be no more than a plain text editor.

The verdict is that it is 'neat'. GPE shows potential, though I would
like scalable icons and nicer fonts on the UI front, but I guess it is
way too early to be asking for that. Assuming you have a backup of your
Palm that you can restore from, I think it is neat to try as
hard-resetting (assuming you do _not_ flash) drops you back to a
factory-default Palm OS again.

-- 
Chris I <chris at chrisirwin.ca>