Quote:
Originally Posted by e-enker
Yeah I see what you mean.
So does that mean you also cannot put the symbian os on a gps-device...because I always wanted a pda with a sunlight viewable screen, but I think only gps devices have that...so if you tried to put the symbian on a gps..would you have the same problems with the display and the drivers?
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Yes, unless Symbian already had drivers available for the hardware the device used.
When porting an OS to new hardware, the first question is the CPU. You need machine code that actually runs on that device.
Each CPU has an "instruction set" - the basic operations built into the hardware that the CPU can perform. The OS needs to be compiled for that architecture and instruction set, to get machine code that will run on it.
Linux includes the Gnu compiler suite. The Gnu compiler can compile C, C++, Fortran, Objective C, Ada, and Java. The compiler is split into two logical parts: a front end parser that understands the language being compiled, and a back end code generator that produces object code (machine code) for the selected architecture. This means you can use the compiler to build programs for a different device than the compiler is running on. One development environment for Palm OS included GCC built as a "cross compiler". You wrote, compiled, and debugged your code on a PC, and the compiler created machine code for the Motorola MC680X0 architecture Palm devices used to use, which you could transfer to the Palm and run.
The hangup, as always, is drivers. The OS needs code that lets it talk to the particular hardware the device uses. If you are running Windows, you mostly don't think about it because Windows includes drivers for just about everything, (though if you are a gamer, you probably spend time making sure you have the latest and greatest driver for your nVidia or ATI graphics card, because the one supplied with Windows won't be the most recent version.)
If you are porting an OS to a new device, you may have to roll your own drivers. You need specs for the hardware you want to support, and may need to write in assembly language for the low level hardware access. This is a non-trivial process, done by experienced pros, only when they have no other choice.
My PDA has a sunlight viewable screen. All I have to do is turn the backlight completely off, and my device lets me do that.
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Dennis