OESF Portables Forum
General Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: ArchiMark on July 29, 2005, 11:58:23 am
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Thought someone in this illustrious group might be able to provide some input for me....
Recently got 2 more toys, I mean handheld devices to complement my C3000...
One is a Sigmarion III runs WinCE.net v4.1 and the other is a SmartBook G138 running WinCE.net v.4.2.
Both are clamshell style designs.
Would like to know if Linux is available for either one of these units.
I tried googling for this and found some Japanese websites regarding the Sig3. However, hard to decipher the translated webpages....
Appreciate any and all input on this....
Thanks!
Mark
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Thought someone in this illustrious group might be able to provide some input for me....
Recently got 2 more toys, I mean handheld devices to complement my C3000...
One is a Sigmarion III runs WinCE.net v4.1 and the other is a SmartBook G138 running WinCE.net v.4.2.
Both are clamshell style designs.
Would like to know if Linux is available for either one of these units.
I tried googling for this and found some Japanese websites regarding the Sig3. However, hard to decipher the translated webpages....
Appreciate any and all input on this....
Thanks!
Mark
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lucky guy, wish I had the money to buy toys like that on a whim!
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Well, omro, FWIW, I actually had to sell a Fujitsu laptop to fund this new project... so no free lunch....
Mark
lucky guy, wish I had the money to buy toys like that on a whim!
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One is a Sigmarion III runs WinCE.net v4.1 and the other is a SmartBook G138 running WinCE.net v.4.2.
Would like to know if Linux is available for either one of these units.
What I have recently thought much about is why we are always lookinf for Linux for a specific device and why not run Linux as a process on top of WinCE.
CYGWIN has demonstrated that it can work on Windows.
What about a "PocketTux.exe" that is a full Linux sandbox to be installed on any WinCE? I already have a demo working - but I am not at all familiar with VisualC for PocketPC...
Just a hack that opens a Text console window and prints some messages through a syscall() function that recognizes some of the Linux system calls.
Unfortunately I have not yet found a way to make a bundle to publish that in a reasonable way.
-- hns
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Sounds like a great idea, hns!
I'm ready to test it, if you ever figure out a way to distribute it...
Mark
What I have recently thought much about is why we are always lookinf for Linux for a specific device and why not run Linux as a process on top of WinCE.
CYGWIN has demonstrated that it can work on Windows.
What about a "PocketTux.exe" that is a full Linux sandbox to be installed on any WinCE? I already have a demo working - but I am not at all familiar with VisualC for PocketPC...
Just a hack that opens a Text console window and prints some messages through a syscall() function that recognizes some of the Linux system calls.
Unfortunately I have not yet found a way to make a bundle to publish that in a reasonable way.
-- hns
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What I have recently thought much about is why we are always lookinf for Linux for a specific device and why not run Linux as a process on top of WinCE.
CYGWIN has demonstrated that it can work on Windows.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=90183\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
Many reasons come to mind:
Much more likely to crash a handheld with two OSes running.
Lower performance, due to two OSes consuming resources, and some system calls being wrapped twice or more.
Windows CE has an interesting memory management system, that lets it dynamically alter the size of the program memory and storage memory. You can manually set it to a specific program/storage percentage, however, the memory daemon knows more than you, and really likes a 50/50 split. So most of the time you'll be running with less than half of the memory available to Linux (as CE consumes some), and even then, if too much gets saved on the Windows storage, it'll dynamically resize the split, and I'm guessing Linux wouldn't like some of it's memory to suddenly go away.
Unfortunately I have not yet found a way to make a bundle to publish that in a reasonable way.
I can help you with that, whether you're talking about hosting the download, or packaging it for Windows CE.
An interesting concept, that though tried many times, very rarely gets past the stage you're at now.
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Much more likely to crash a handheld with two OSes running.
Depends on... If well designed, Linux should never crash...
Lower performance, due to two OSes consuming resources, and some system calls being wrapped twice or more.
That is true. I do not expect wonders in execution speed, but wonders in getting it to work on new CE devices coming out next year... That is IMHO the achilles heel of the Linux for Handhelds projects: new device hardware is coming out faster than people understanding how to port Familiar Linux/OpenZaurus etc. to them...
Windows CE has an interesting memory management system, that lets it dynamically alter the size of the program memory and storage memory. You can manually set it to a specific program/storage percentage, however, the memory daemon knows more than you, and really likes a 50/50 split. So most of the time you'll be running with less than half of the memory available to Linux (as CE consumes some), and even then, if too much gets saved on the Windows storage, it'll dynamically resize the split, and I'm guessing Linux wouldn't like some of it's memory to suddenly go away.
I am not familiar with that - look like it needs a smart way to work around. E.g. Swap space?
I can help you with that, whether you're talking about hosting the download, or packaging it for Windows CE.
I mean packaging because I have not a full Windows development environment for such a project. I have only limited access to a Windows machine. The only software I had installed was the Embedded Visual C++ Version 4.0 environment. But it lacks tools like tar, gzip etc. And the full source package includes a lot of unused stuff from the Linux kernels which makes it sum up to 38 MByte. The executable itself is very small (well it is a demo :-). I have run it in the emulator.
I have attached the executable - which I hope works on ARM (I am not sure if I have not compiled for i86 so that it rus in the emulator only).
-- hns
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I have attached the executable - which I hope works on ARM (I am not sure if I have not compiled for i86 so that it rus in the emulator only).
-- hns
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You must've made it for x86 emulator, as I get the error "'PocketTux' is not a valid Pocket PC application." on my PDA, and "C:\[...]\pockettux.exe application cannot be run in Win32 mode" on my PC.
I am not familiar with that - look like it needs a smart way to work around. E.g. Swap space?
Swap space could work, but you'd need to be carefull not to use all the RAM disk, as the daemon would resize the partition to be bigger to allow for more storage.
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You must've made it for x86 emulator, as I get the error "'PocketTux' is not a valid Pocket PC application." on my PDA, and "C:\[...]\pockettux.exe application cannot be run in Win32 mode" on my PC.
Ok, I will try to recompile (if I find out how to do - its my first Win project :-) for ARM PDAs...
That will need some time since I am on vacation without access to the XP machine. But I have copied the sources onto my Mac. So I might find some time in the next days to delete the unused parts of the sources and post a source package here.
-- hns