Squeak on an iPAQ

Aaron J Reichow reic0024 at d.umn.edu
Thu Sep 21 18:26:58 UTC 2000


On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Douglas Brebner wrote:

> On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Mike Shields wrote:
> > Right, it's a handheld. It runs WinCE 3.0, and the OS is in Flash ROM. It
> > has 16mb of Flash ROM, and 32mb of SDRAM. Linux has been ported to it, and I
> > think I remember that squeak runs on Linux/ARM, so that might be easy.
> > However, I'm kinda shy about flashing my rom and maybe rendering my new toy
> > useless. 
> > 
> > I thought squeak had already been ported to versions of CE, figured it might
> > just be a minimal effort port to get it working on the iPAQ.
> 
> A bare hardware port should be possible too. There's links to all the
> hardware docs at http://www.handhelds.org/Compaq/iPAQH3600/index.html
> Maybe the Itsy port could be reused for this.
> 
> It would go nicely with Dans PDA application :)

A port of Squeak to the Linux framebuffer would probably be the best
solution, leveraging drivers and hw support as a part of the Linux kernel,
but dumping the rest of user-land Linux (including X- why run X for a
Squeak only machine?), and having Squeak run directly on the framebuffer.
I've been trying to do this (using Tim's Squeak code for the Itsy), and
work has been slow.  Never worked with the VM or the linux fb before.  

If anyone else has experience with these (especially the fb) and wants to
help out, I can send you my current sources.  They compile, but Smalltalk
spits out an error to stdout, and it segfaults.

This would be, of course, be toward the end of an all Squeak PDA.  I was
going to start writting something similar to what Dan released a few days
ago, but will have to take a look at it.  Also, some other PDA-like things
(move PDA-like window management, NewtonOS like widgets) need to be
implemented.

My target machine is any PDA (or desktop, I suppose) that runs Squeak.
What I'm developing for is the Helio (http://www.myhelio.com), but there's
also the iPaq, the Agenda PDA, and the Yopy as potential Squeak machines.
Different architectures, but they could all run the same apps with no
fuss.

Aaron






More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list