Building squeak for a linux handheld

James Fenn jfenn at jamesfenn.co.uk
Tue Apr 4 01:23:29 UTC 2006


Hi all. I'm currently trying to build a working squeak vm for the
htc-universal phone. For those of you who don't know, it's a large clamshell
phone/pda with a 640 by 480 touchscreen, a 520Mhz pxa270 processor, 64M of
ram, a full qwerty keyboard, GSM/GPRS/UTMS, wifi and all sorts of gubbins...
A nice machine for a bit of squeaking.

I have used an old squeak vm under Windows Mobile and it is possible to use
a full morphic environment albeit a little slow however software compiled
for earlier editions of windowsCE run very slowly on the latest version of
the OS and I think/hope a linux port would do a lot better.

The linux port is underway and drivers have been made for the screen,
keyboard, sound and a dodgy touchscreen driver. Progress has of late been
quite rapid but there is still much to do. A library is being worked on to
abstract the phone functions for the various linux ports to windows mobile
phones. 

My fantasy is to have a squeak environment running on the linux framebuffer
with plugins for the phone functions and the various other facilities.
However, I am a terrible C coder and my progress will be painfully slow so I
apologise in advance for the dumb sounding questions I am sure to ask.

I have managed to do a first compile of the 3.7-7 source. I had to do some
ugly hacking of the configure.ac that I found on a webpage about building
squeak for the gumstix. I'm not sure whether this was the right thing to do
but at least it made it possible to compile. The resulting binary gets as
far as drawing a white screen with a mouse pointer in the centre using the
vm-display-fbdev driver. Does anyone have any good tests to suggest to see
if the vm is alive? Perhaps using the vm-display-null driver.

I would like to use tslib on the handhelds.org site to tack on touchscreen
support in the vm-display-fbdev however I'm finding the code a little hard
to understand *blush* as there are no comments at all.

Thanks for listening. Any help, advice or pointers would be greatly
appreciated.

James






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