jamey.hicks@compaq.com
Copyright © 2002 by James E. Hicks
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| Revision $Revision: 1.43 $ | $Date: 2003/02/21 19:48:52 $ | Revised by: $Author: jamey $ |
This document is a work in progress. As you can see, it is just the beginning of the document it will be. It will be assembled from material on the handhelds.org mailing lists (see the Section called Handhelds.org Resources).
Although I started this document thinking I was just going to write a FAQ, it has turned into a User's Manual for Linux on the Handhelds, in particular for the Familiar Linux Distribution, with an emphasis on the iPAQ. Therefore, questions are answered throughout the document. Please see the Index of this document for links to many such answers (Index)
In the Section called Getting Started with Linux on iPAQ, I will try to briefly cover all the topics necessary to run Linux on the iPAQ. In the Section called Frequently Answered Questions, I will try to briefly answer many of the questions that come up on the mailing lists. The remaining sections will expand on each of the topics in more detail.
This document is available in the following forms:
The handhelds.org project followed on from the Itsy project. The goal was to produce a research platform for handheld computing.
We started the work on an iPAQ development board in April 2000. By June 2000 we had the Linux running on the iPAQ with the X Window System along with drivers for most of the input-output devices builtin to the iPAQ. We also had source and binaries posted on handhelds.org.
By August 2000, there were at least two companies showing commercial software on the iPAQ. At this point, our aspirations raised from a simple development platform to an eventual commercial offering.
At this point in time, we think that Linux on handhelds is not ready for broad consumer appeal, but it does provide choices and customization possibilities not available with PocketPC or Palm. There is a choice of at least 5 graphical toolkits with Linux: GTK, Qt, Microwindows, wxwindows and the original Xt. Some of these use X11 but the others use the bare framebuffer interface.
One of the main advantages of Linux on the iPAQ is that it uses the mainstream Linux kernel. It does not use a stripped-down variant. Except for storage and screen size issues, applications can be ported directly to the iPAQ without requiring major rewrites. The Debian GNU/Linux Distribution distribution contains packages built for ARM-Linux, originally targeted for ARM linux desktop machines. Because the iPAQ runs a standard kernel and filesystem, we can install Debian packages on the iPAQ without having to recompile.
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