Date: Thu, 11 Jun 1998 17:06:25 -0400 From: "Duncan, John" <jddst19@srg.psych.pitt.edu> To: "'freebsd-small@freebsd.org'" <freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: FreeBSD for PalmPilot/Palm III Message-ID: <B57B47656446D111BDCE0060B01A8CAE05D123@srg.psych.pitt.edu>
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Hi guys- Is anyone on this list interested in FreeBSD for handheld computers, notably the PalmPilot and the Palm III? If so, I'd like to join the discussion, and if not, it would be interesting to create it. If you haven't noticed, there is a Linux development team for the Pilot. I think it would be cool to see what are the truly necessary parts of FreeBSD, and to what extent FreeBSD can be implemented on a small machine like the Pilot. One thing is for sure: the Pilot version can only keep the "Spirit of FreeBSD" and not borrow too much of the actual source--the chip is Motorola's Dragonball 68328 Integrated Microcomputer which resembles a 68000 with lots of added hardware. All of it is dissimilar to anything FreeBSD runs on now. A major benefit of this project would be the ability to translate small source onto the large model and make FreeBSD Amiga, FreeBSD NeXT, etc. We could also go into versions for WindowsCE machines. After all, who really wants WindowsCE? It's junk. What could be really cool would be to create a FreeBSD EEPROM for some of those CE machines and let people replace it. In the future, Palm machines will be Flash-upgradeable, which makes the capacity to which an alternative OS can run much greater. For now, the PalmPilot Professional and better have a TCP/IP stack, Serial, Graphics and Input libraries, and a number of hidden "features" that make hacking it a bit like hacking a Macintosh. Actually, a lot like hacking a Mac. In addition, the EEPROM is easy to get at, and thus can be replaced. 3Com is much nicer to their owners than Apple used to be as far as tweaking these little machines, so if this list were to talk to them we might find out a lot about what can be done. If people are interested, let's get this discussion going. One request: if you don't think that this is a worthwhile venture, please don't go off about how you think it's stupid, unreasonable, unfeasible. In a way, the PDA is all of these things, but there's no reason to keep UNIX off of them. Besides... Are we going to let Linux and Microsoft get the better of this market? -John To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message
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