A Squeak PDA

Ohshima, Yoshiki Yoshiki.Ohshima at disney.com
Sat Nov 10 00:07:31 UTC 2001


  Aaron,

> > Actually I suspect you'd find much of it already done and plenty of help
> > being offered. The SqueakNOS gang is doing very well.
> 
> But it's not been done for the iPAQ.  I have no experience writing
> bootloaders, creating a ramfs, or devising ways to use external libs and
> binaries from POSIX-world.  As much as I'd like a pure Smalltalk or Common
> Lisp machine, I have (self-imposed) limits in time and
> ability.

  I'm just curious, but given that you're interested in
Squeak'ing on iPAQ, what is the *practical* reason to avoid
WinCE and to go for Linux (or SqueakNOS-ish) OS?  I don't
like Microsoft too much, but so far I haven't find any good
reason to justify to switch to Linux.

  The Squeak VM for WinCE/iPAQ uses direct frame buffer
access to display and supports both fullscreen mode and
non-fullscreen mode.  The C compiler is also available for
*free*, (which merely means you don't have to pay) so you
can modify VM easily.  And when new device is released from
3rd party, the driver is always available for WinCE and you
can use it right away.  And also, thanks to Andreas, the
support code is more stable.

  32MB process segmentation hurts a little, but Noel's file
mapped heap helps.

  Anyway, once Squeak is launched on the device, it can be
more or less "pure" Squeak machine.

  FYI, if you really interested in Linux PDA, Sharp's coming
PDA for US market seems pretty impressive platform.  The
hardware has two media slots and retractable keyboard in
almost the same size of body as iPAQ and it uses Embedix as
the OS and they seems to allow you to recompile the
kernel. (I don't know how far they allow us to go, though.)
Right now, you can order it with $399 dollars.

http://developer.sharpsec.com

-- Yoshiki




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