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Originally Posted by e-enker
I didnt know that its a linux system, I thought irex built it from scratch.
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Nope. Nobody builds an OS from scratch these days. Far easier, faster, and cheaper to take an extant one, like Linux, and customize from there.
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Hey, the android system is out or will be out soon and the cool thing is that nokia will make their symbian os freely available.
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Android had been out for a while. I have the SDK here. What we didn't have till now was any device actually
running it. The first phone running it has just been released.
Symbian will take a bit longer. It was owned by a consortium. Nokia had to buy the share they didn't own first, and more work is required before they can fully release it as open source, but I think doing so is a smart move.
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Nekokami, you said that one would need a driver for the display...isnt the display controlled by the hardware itself?
I mean, its not an external device, and the minimum requirements for operating systems only indicate processor, ram and rom, but never the display...but then again, what do I know.
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The display controller is hardware. But the OS requires a device driver to talk to it. The OS and the applications have to tell the display controller what to paint on the screen. How do they talk to it? Through a driver that knows how to address that device.
Linux itself is the OS kernel. It handles memory and process management. Linux requires drivers that know how to talk to the particular hardware the system uses. The drivers link to the kernel and become part of the executing Linux image.
Drivers have been the problem for as long as Linux has existed. It's much better now, but you still have the concern "Do drivers exist for the particular combination of hardware in my system?" I recall cries of unhappiness in Linux forums from folks trying to get it to run on older laptops using the Neomagic display controller. Neomagic required developers to sign an NDA before providing the information that would let them create driver for it. Linux is open source, and the license requires that the source code for drivers be available as well as the source code for the kernel. Neomagic would not permit the source code for drivers to be released. So if you had a machine with a Neomagic controller, you were out of luck - you would not be able to run Linux on it, because it would have no way to handle the screen.
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Can you change the boot order of the iliad that you could try another os from a usb stick or a card, or would you have to delete the existing linux and put the symbian for example on the internal memory?
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Before you could run another OS on the iLiad, that OS would have to support the hardware it used. Drivers, again.
The best way to go for what you want would be the solution Access used for ALP (Access Linux Platform) which they are shopping to smartphone manufacturers. Access bought Palmsource, the former Palm OS division. Their original plan was to make the unreleased Palm OS Cobalt the UI layer on top of a Linux kernel. The user and the applications would talk to Cobalt, Cobalt would talk to Linux, and Linux would talk to the hardware.
What they actually wound up doing was implementing Palm OS Garnet, the current version fo Palm OS, as a virtual machine running on top of Linux. Palm applications essentially run in their own sandbox, separate from the main OS.
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Dennis