Intimte_a1 is released

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is with the greatest of pleasure that we today proclaim the intimate
project http://intimate.handhelds.org ready for beta release and general
consumption by developers and interested parties. This release is named
version _a1 (not alpha 1)

The intimate project is a fully blown debian environment for the Compaq iPAQ
for the lucky few with enough storage to run it. The current base
requirement after installation is approximately 140MB, although this can be
reduced to as little as 64MB ith a different selection of packages. The
intimate project aims to bridge the gap between the debian arm distribution
and the familiar distribution to provide a fully working debian based system
for the iPAQ, giving a full development environment for native application
development for Familiar.

*** Using the mtdblkdev driver that was just released, you can fit 140MB of
data on a 96MB CF ***
*** It takes two minutes to mount a card, and the install procedure hasn't
been updated yet ***
*** but we've got 140Mb of intimate on a 96MB CF card with about 96MB of
free space :) ***

The environment is configured so that it will co-exist with the Familiar
environment. A modified /linuxrc attempts to detect the presence of a
suitable alternate boot device at startup. If no alternatives are available,
then the familiar distribution is booted from flash as normal.

The default installation contains all the tools and utilities for kernel
compilation natively on the iPAQ, additional tools can be installed using a
simple 'apt-get install <packagename>' and there's the whole of the Debian
unstable feed to choose from, plus a range of iPAQ specific.debs available
from the intimate .deb repositary. (apt-cache stats currently reports 6509
available packages, most of which work reasonably by default, 55 of these
are ipaq specific packages in the intimate repositary. Of those 55, three
were built in bed, and one on the train) The intimate distribution let's you
sit code, compile and test wherever you are.

Of course, you can do a whole lot more than just compile code. There's the
obligatory MP3 players, games (lxdoom, tetris etc), web browsers, email
apps, word processors... you name it.. you've got the whole of debian
unstable to use remember. Sure, not everything's going to work, but the
large majority seems just fine if you've got a bit of swap. Check the
screenshots to see some of the stuff that's working already.
http://intimate.handhelds.org/screens.html

So please, if you're lucky enough to have the space to use, then please,
give it a try.
We'd love to know what you think...(as long as it's good :-)

Just one last thing...

We would like to express our extreme thanks and gratitude to CRL for the
whole iPAQ thing,
but especially for hosting the intimate project on handhelds.org . Thank you
very very much CRL!

Tangent & Jacques
Received on Wed Jun 27 06:47:41 2001