palm OS on iliad?

[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?

[nekokami]

You'd need a device driver for the display, among other things. But several PDA applications have been ported to the iLiad. Is there something in particular you were looking for?

[DonRobodroid]

Sure, the ereader software and its DRMed library worth a couple of hundreds of bucks (and that's mine alone) would be quite valuable...

Cheers,
- Don [:-]

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DonRobodroid

Sure, the ereader software and its DRMed library worth a couple of hundreds of bucks (and that's mine alone) would be quite valuable...

Cheers,
- Don [:-]

The way most eReader eBooks are formatted, on a screen of the size of an iLiad, it would look horrible and the reading experience would be awful.

[DonRobodroid]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The way most eReader eBooks are formatted, on a screen of the size of an iLiad, it would look horrible and the reading experience would be awful.

Yeah true. And the limited library functionality... gruesome.

On the other hand: the lightning fast dictionary lookup, the SEARCH function, the annotation function... *sigh*

Two hearts beat in my breast.

But hey, soon, SOON iRex will have Mobi up and running in a shining new armor...

Cheers,
- Don [:-]

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DonRobodroid

Yeah true. And the limited library functionality... gruesome.

On the other hand: the lightning fast dictionary lookup, the SEARCH function, the annotation function... *sigh*

Two hearts beat in my breast.

But hey, soon, SOON iRex will have Mobi up and running in a shining new armor...

Cheers,
- Don [:-]

So what is iRex going to do? have a new model with a better version of Mobipocket?

[DMcCunney]

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?

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.
______
Dennis

[DonRobodroid]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

So what is iRex going to do? have a new model with a better version of Mobipocket?

New model - we don't know about it, but it's very probable they're working on one.
New mobipocket software - that's what they hinted at (or even promised?) in a former thread here or over at irex's forum. However, that was some months ago and will take presumably some more, but Hope Dies Last...

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

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.

Given iliad's current speed, you probably wouldn't want to have it run more than one application at a time...
But you're right, of course. PalmOS is designed for a totally different generation of computers and displays, so we don't really NEED it.


Cheers,
- Don [:-]

[e-enker]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

You know, I dont care about the palm os in particular, I just wondered if it is at all possible to put just any os on the iliad, be it palm, windows mobile or any open source software.

You cannot type texts on the iliad, right, so I thought that maybe with a operating system you might be able to have all the features like word processing etc.

So you say that if it is a problem, then its not because of the internal hardware but because of the display of the iliad?

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by e-enker

You cannot type texts on the iliad, right, so I thought that maybe with a operating system you might be able to have all the features like word processing etc.

There are quite a few open source Linux applications available for the iLiad, see Wiki - Iliad Software. There isn't a word processor listed, but Abiword with Registry Installer is available (considered a beta release).

It is fair to say that many Linux applications can't run on the iLiad because of resource and configuration issues, and many others don't yet run on the iLiad because all porting is done by volunteers in their own time. The hardware is capable of much more than the current software base allows, but at this point it is probably the next generation of EInk devices that will have the best chance of becoming useful general purpose handhelds. At least some of them will have faster screen refreshes, better partial screen updating, and a touch screen.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by e-enker

You know, I dont care about the palm os in particular, I just wondered if it is at all possible to put just any os on the iliad, be it palm, windows mobile or any open source software.

Um... do you understand that the iLiad is currently running Linux as an operating system?

[e-enker]

I didnt know that its a linux system, I thought irex built it from scratch.

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.

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.

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?

[nekokami]

The different functions of any computer are often manufactured by different vendors, and each requires a separate instruction set. The instruction set may be compiled into the OS, or it may be external to the OS in a driver. The latter is the more common method these days, but the driver doesn't always work in a new version of the same OS. It depends on whether it used undocumented or deprecated system calls, for example.

In the case of the iLiad, it uses a different display controller than most other e ink devices on the market, developed by iRex themselves, and only iRex has the source for the driver. Their source isn't compatible with Linux 2.6, apparently, and I doubt very much that it would work as-is with Symbian. And it may also be dependent on the CPU of the device. So far, iRex has not released the source for the proprietary parts of the iLiad OS, including their custom drivers. So another OS on the iLiad would be quite a project.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by e-enker

I didnt know that its a linux system, I thought irex built it from scratch.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.
______
Dennis

[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?