SqueakOS

johnm at wdi.disney.com johnm at wdi.disney.com
Sat Jan 2 21:37:41 UTC 1999


Thanks for the interesting info and pointers.

The one thing I wonder about is how you get something like OSKit to boot
instead of Win 95. On a machine with a disk, it may be merely a matter
of changing the boot blocks of the disk. But my real interest
in a portable OS is for hardware like the latest crop of WinCE machines
which don't have hard disks. They boot from a ROM that's probably
soldered to the board. How can one "take over" such a machine with
a custom OS? It could be impossible, especially if the OS in ROM turns
on memory protection.

The Compaq Itsy is nice because it is a semi-open hardware platform.
They give all the hardware specs you need to write drivers, and they
have a way to load new OS kernels into the boot "ROM" (Flash RAM,
actually). Unfortunately, this is still a research project and Itsy's
are not available unless you happen to be at one the Universities
that they are collaborating with.

	-- John





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