Quote:
Originally Posted by e-enker
Would it be possible to run a palm operating system on the iliad?
I know that some palm pdas have an xscale processor like the iliad, shouldnt it be possible to use the iliad like a pda? or is this not possible because of the special display of the iliad?
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Possible? Maybe. Palm OS 5 units all use ARM CPUs, of which the X-Scale is a variant. ARM, Ltd. licenses the design for ARM processors, and Intel (who sold that division off to Marvell), Motorola, and Texas Instruments all make ARM processors.
OS5 is actually a hybrid design. Older Palm devices used the Motorola "Dragonball" CPU, which is an MC680X0 architecture chip. To permit backwards compatibility when them moved to ARM, OS 5 implements an abstraction layer. MC680X0 instructions are intercepted and converted to ARM instructions for execution, so the vast majority of existing older Palm OS applications run as expected. In fact, Palm OS programming is still rooted in the MC680X0 architecture. Newer applications may have ARMlets - modules of native ARM code intended to speed up calculation intensive operations - but I'm only aware of one "pure" ARM application for Palm devices.
Access has taken Palm OS Garnet and made is a virtual machine running under a Linux kernel on the ALP OS they are pitching to smartphone manufacturers. They have a beta of the GVM out that runs on the Nokia 770, 800, and 810 Internet Tablets. According to an ACCESS rep, the GVM is Linux-agnostic, and one of their engineers was able to get the GVM up on a new version of Linux in a day. (Mostly a matter of diddling the appropriate header files and doing a "make".
I suppose it ought to be possible to get the GVM to run on the iLiad, if you can get access to the code. The issue, as mentioned, is drivers.
The bigger issue is why you want to run Palm OS on the iliad at all. Palm OS has a fundamental limitation: it's single tasking. There's a lot of Palm software out there, but it's not clear what might be something that you would want to run on the Iliad, even if you could.
I'd be more inclined to getting Google's Android OS up on the iLiad. It's open source, and modular, so you include the bits you need to support your hardware and desired capabilities.
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Dennis