[kwlug disc.] Linux on Palm? AccessLINUX?

[Andrew Kohlsmith]

On Saturday 17 February 2007 1:59 am, Chris I wrote:
> 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).

Yes, the Palm Vx was damn near perfect; the m515 I loved (a little thicker 
than the Vx but had a vibrate and LED feature).  If the m515 had the TX's 
screen, wifi and BT I'd be in heaven.

I very much like the TX, and in my copious spare time (ha!) I am helping the 
Linux effort on that.  It's booting, but wifi and BT support are still in the 
works.

Actually one of the IRC channels I hang out in has a lot of Palm hackers in it 
and we're all in the same boat: we want Linux with PalmOS emulation on these 
devices.  I don't care if it's a PPC device or a Palm device, but run Linux 
and can emulate PalmOS 5 calls (maybe even virtualize the entire PalmOS for 
now).  Palm has a metric buttload of software, some of it very, very good, 
and it's one of the biggest reasons I don't want to move away from it.

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

:-)

> 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

Both of the open phones are GSM only.  I won't give Rogers a penny.  Give me 
decent BT and I'll just tether to a cheap (W)CDMA phone.  The phone'll be 
thin, the device can stay thin, and I'm not locked to a provider.

> 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:

Yes, CoCoLinux is amazing.

> 	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).

If you're running off of MMC/SD it will be dog-slow.  That is precisely why 
Palm pulls the apps into RAM and runs them there.

-A.