Aaron J Reichow wrote:

> There seems to be increasing interest in this since Jay has release the
> preview of Squeak on the Helio.  Would there been any interest amoung us
> to start a PDA-Squeak (that is, UI, Apps, frameworks) project? Perhaps
> host it on Sourceforge?

I think that it wouldn't be a bad idea to just make a Squeak No-OS port
to run on the Palm or Helio. The hardware seems pretty simple, though I don't
know
how much has been documented. I suspect that the people trying to put
Linux on the Palm have figured out quite a bit, and the Dragonball
processor is documented. The Helio seems to be better documented.

I don't see that having Linux underneath really helps much. After all,
there isn't really anything there except memory, display, keyboard,
touch screen and a few ports. No real reason to have, for instance,
a file system (especially if you have Squeak!).

And few existing Linux apps (certainly few UI ones) work with that
small a display.

I think that the same effort (probably less) could have been spent
porting Squeak directly to the hardware. Anyone with basic knowledge
of embedded system programming should be able to do it.

Squeak already has a handwriting recognizer built in. Doing support
for the SPI (serial interface) would be pretty simple.

As far as interrupt handlers, it should be possible to
signal Semaphores from low-level code safely (can this be done
asynchronously?).

A simple network stack and PPP could be added (see Katix at
http://www.funet.fi/~kate/katix.html for an example of a GPL'd network stack
that runs on a 68302 and provides IP, ICMP, and UDP)

Anyway, just food for thought...

-- 
Ned Konz
currently: Stanwood, WA
email:     ned at bike-nomad.com
homepage:  http://bike-nomad.com