[PD] PDA suggestions

[derek holzer]

howdy,

 > I had the feeling you would be the first one to reply on this subject

Maybe just 'cause I'm pretty deep into it myself right now ;-)

 > do you run familiar on the Ipaq or is there a better option?

Yes, I'm running Familiar 0.8.1 right now. Again, see my install notes 
for details. There are some idiosyncracies in the audio that should be 
resolved in 0.8.2 (namely no ALSA support!)

http://iem.kug.ac.at/mailinglists/pd-list/2005-03/026706.html

There is another distro called Intimate for Ipaq that uses all standard 
Debian ARM packages, but it is pretty much dead in the water for more 
than a year, so kernel support for newer Ipaqs isn't really there. I'm 
curious myself how easy it would be to include Debian repositories in 
the list of package sources for Familiar. They are supposed to be 
compatible, but I don't know what kind of a mess the dependencies will 
become. I'll look into it soon.

Sometimes I wished there was a good Gentoo for ARM... big problem would 
be how to actually compile anything in less than 5 years on an Ipaq! 
There are technically Gentoo-ARM and Gentoo-embedded trees, and a Gentoo 
netboot, but it's barely wearing it's first pair of shoes:

http://dev.gentoo.org/~vapier/arm/

See also:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-8090.html
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=1341859

and Gentoo for Zaurus, if you are really a Gentoo junkie:

http://gentooforzaurus.opensistemas.com/
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-124018.html

The core of Familiar is Open Embedded, which may be less "user friendly" 
than Opie or GPE Familiar, but more flexible:

http://www.openembedded.org/

More ARM info:

http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/

And another kind of ARM portable is here:

http://arm.org/portable.htm

;-)

I think this new development of ARM as a standard for portable computing 
is really exciting, as we can expect loads of PDAs, mobile phones, game 
units and other stuff to be using this processor in the near future. 
Whatever ground gets broken now for "reclaiming" it with Linux and 
running stuff like PDa on it sets a real precedent for what is possible 
later on as far as mobile multimedia. Rock on!

best,
derek

-- 
derek holzer ::: http://www.umatic.nl
---Oblique Strategy # 52:
"Do nothing for as long as possible"