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BSD Operating Systems

Palmtop NetBSD 154

Posted by CowboyNeal from the small-installations dept.
BSD Forums writes "'Of course it runs NetBSD.' NetBSD is fantastically portable, but that doesn't make it supremely easy to install on oddball hardware like a Dreamcast or a palmtop computer. Michael Lucas demonstrates cross-installation with the HP Jornada."
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Palmtop NetBSD More

Palmtop NetBSD

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  • I think SCO should sue (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 07, 2003 @11:30AM (#6138969)
    For something... but I don't know what, and I don't think that matters to them, either.

  • Oh no, here come the trolls...... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 07, 2003 @11:30AM (#6138970)
    BSD is alive an well. Why does everyone keep saying it is dying?

  • portability (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Twister002 ( 537605 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @11:35AM (#6138986) Homepage
    Does anyone know of a linux or BSD based distro that will install on an old Palm Pilot? Not the III or V lines, the original lines. I've got one just sitting around. I've already got a replacement for it I just want to play around with it. Does anyone have any links for instructions on installing Linux (or any other OS) on them?

    • Re:portability (Score:5, Informative)

      by BenjyD ( 316700 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @11:48AM (#6139014)
      Well, there's palm linux (palm-linux.sourceforge.net). Doesn't work on my m100, dunno about the older Palms.
      • It seems like there's a higher compatability with earlier models. Most of the Palms listed as working on the proget's site use DragonballEZ processors (IIIx and later) although they do mention a modified Palm Pro (Dragonball processor) working. If nothing else, you should be able to slap a Palm Pro or Palm III upgrade card in and give it a whirl. It's not exactly standard hardware, but I'm sure the project would apreciate some feedback on if it works.

    • Re:portability (Score:3, Insightful)

      by techturtle ( 528069 )
      Check out Embedded Linux/Microcontoller project [uclinux.org] I've never tried it personally, but looks promissing. Don't know about support for the older platforms you're talking about though. Gives you somewhere to start though.

      Some very usefull tools that I've used on newer Palm devices with net connectivity:
      Top Gun SSH [www.ai] - Works pretty good for remote shell access.
      PalmVNC [btinternet.co.uk] - Decent VNC implementation for the Palm.

      Not *nix on the Palm, but gives you good access to remote systems.

    • Re:portability (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Don't know if this is what you had in mind, but embedded *nix in general is getting big, so you might be interested in further devloping upon this project [uclinux.org]. Another valuable site is this one [sourceforge.net]. If you've got some programming skills, contributing to these projects would be greatly appreciated I'm sure.

  • Full text: (Score:4, Informative)

    by parkanoid ( 573952 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @11:37AM (#6138994)
    Palmtop NetBSD
    by Michael Lucas
    06/05/2003

    In my previous article, I discussed building the latest NetBSD-current and installing it on your system. Today, we take things a little further and use NetBSD's cross-building abilities as a tool to install it on a rather unusual platform â" specifically, the HP Jornada 728 palmtop, which comes with Windows CE (WinCE) embedded. While HP no longer makes this device, you can pick them up used or on auction sites. The process discussed here uses examples from the Jornada 728, but with some tweaking will work on many other types of hardware. You could even install onto standard PC hardware in this manner, if you wanted to be masochistic about it.

    Setup
    This method requires that you already have a NetBSD machine that can physically accept the disk device you want to install onto, and that has the same sort of disklabel(8) as the Jornada, which means that you need the same endian hardware. You're probably best off running standard X86 hardware for this type of installation on this type of palmtop. In this example, I use a Toshiba laptop running NetBSD-current 1.6P to install NetBSD-current 1.6P on my Jornada. I'm using a 512MB flash card to run NetBSD, and am using a PCMCIA adapter to attach the flash card to the laptop during the installation phase. If you're using a desktop, you could use a USB-to-Flash adapter.

    Running NetBSD on your Jornada will erase all data from the WinCE operating system. That's OK, because you'll never boot back to Windows once you discover the joys of palmtop UNIX, right? Still, you might want the WinCE data some day, so be certain to back up your device before starting this install! Some people who switch boots between WinCE and NetBSD use the backup tool that comes with WinCE to back up their data to the FAT partition on their flash card. If you do this, be sure to use only the backup tool that came with the Jornada, not a newer version.

    NetBSD runs on a whole bunch of hardware that was never intended to run UNIX, so this install isn't really anything special. Each of these unusual platforms has its own unique requirements, which are generally documented on the appropriate port page for that architecture. Check the port page for an instructions document, which in this case is the Using NetBSD/hpcarm page. The directions may be partially obsolete, as code development frequently outpaces the web documentation. Still, it's a good place to start. Also search the mailing list archives for your chosen platform for other people's experiences installing and running NetBSD on that system. Lastly, you'll want to be certain that NetBSD runs on your system â" for example, while the Jornada 720 and 728 are well-supported, the Jornada 820 isn't yet.

    Bootstrapping
    The how-to-use page for hpcarm shows that you need a kernel and a boot loader that runs in the WinCE environment. At this time the page also mentions a root filesystem image, which is not yet available. The only piece you really need to get at this point is the hpcarm boot loader, which is available as a uuencoded file in the NetBSD source tree at /usr/src/sys/arch/hpc/stand/binary/ARM/hpcboot.exe .uu. If you have trouble with uudecode, Google led me to a variety of places from which it could be downloaded. Get the boot loader hpcboot.exe and save it for later. Don't worry about the kernel linked from that page; we'll build our own kernel.

    Now go to your existing NetBSD system. We covered the basics of building NetBSD in the last article, including getting the source code and using the build.sh building system. As each platform has its own compiler requirements, make(1), and so on, we need to start by building these tools for the hpcarm architecture. Here, we use the -T flag to specify where to put these tools, and the -m flag to specify the type of machine for which you're building.

    # cd /usr/src
    # ./build.sh -m hpcarm -T /

  • TI 89 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Elie De Brauwer ( 656349 ) <elie@de-brauwer.be> on Saturday June 07, 2003 @11:40AM (#6139002) Homepage
    When will somebody port it to my TI-89 calculator machine. It has a MC68k processor in it.

    • Re:TI 89 (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Close, but not quite:

      http://sourceforge.net/projects/liteos/

    • never (Score:3, Interesting)

      by SHEENmaster ( 581283 )
      You couldn't fit the kernel into ram, much less enough to do anything useful.

      If you want it bad enough, steal the PDP11 UNIX source from SCO and port that. BSD or Linux will never fit.
      • A PDP-11 UNIX runs in about 2 Mo of RAM. Although I modded my begemot emulator to do 4 MB (and the address space supports it :). Anyway, my emulator is up and running, and boasting a webserver I coded myself here [hackerheaven.org].

        My point, no that wouldn't fit either,Hate to burst your bubble.

        • A PDP-11 UNIX runs in about 2 Mo of RAM.

          ...if you're using a 2MB UNIX. I ran "Sixth Edition" UNIX ages ago on a PDP-11 with 64kB (it was a tight fit, and I had to do a little hackery with an assembly-language stub version of the pipe code in order to get a kernel small enough to let me recompile a regular kernel small enough to fit, but it did work).

          • That's pretty impressive. getting it to boot in such a small memory footprint is one thing, but to be able to compile stuff is another.

            /me tips his hat :)

            • That's pretty impressive.

              Not really. Bear in mind that this was in the late 1970's, and 64KB wasn't a really tiny memory footprint. All I'd done was get it to run in 32KB less than what was, as I remember, the stated minimum memory requirement for V6 - 96KB. If you had a 96KB PDP-11, you had enough memory to run V6 and compile stuff.

  • Done before (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 07, 2003 @11:48AM (#6139013)
    People have done similar installations on Windows CE devices for awhile. For example, I run NetBSD 1.6 on my IBM z50, also with a 512MB Compact Flash card. The only difference is that this installation was done entirely from a NetBSD mothership while I installed from a FreeBSD ftp server I set up.

  • Why bother? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Twyst ( 14428 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @11:52AM (#6139021)
    See, this is the thing I've never understood - why would you install *nix/BSD on a palmtop? Most of the apps out there are not designed for such a small screen - I've experienced the pain of XWindows on a 640x480 screen - And there's such a huge base of apps out there already. Mind you, I prefer the Palm OS over WinCE, and 99% of what I want / need in a PDA is already available.

    I can't see the benefits of this. In my mind, it's like tearing out the upholstery of your car, and replacing it with gravel. Sure, the car's still usable, but it's not comfortable to use, and it looks like crap.

    • Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by addaboy ( 103441 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @11:55AM (#6139031)
      because it's there. it's a hobby thing.

      • Re:Why bother? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Twyst ( 14428 )
        Well, I can sort of understand that - hell, I do casemods..

        But at the same time, a casemod doesn't impair the computer's operation - just its looks.

        There aren't as many apps out there for the PDA *nix market, as far as I know, since it's nowhere near as well-developed. It's like cutting an arm off in exchange for a really cool watch on the other wrist - you lose more than you gain.

        Now, replacing WinCE with PalmOS - THAT would be impressive. PalmOS is far more stable than wince, and there are more apps fo
    • Best guess is he'll be using it as a low-power handheld computer instead of a PDA. Depending on the application, the CLI might be enough. I'm sure the answer will become clear in Part 2.

    • Re:Why bother? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by baka_boy ( 171146 )
      I've got an iPaq that runs Familiar Linux [handhelds.org], and it's a great mobile hacking and experimentation platform. True, I wouldn't want to write full apps with the tiny onscreen keyboard, but it's nice to be able to either try out an algorithm or quick script idea in Python on a full-featured Linux system that fits in a coat pocket. If I had the extra couple of hundred dollars lying around, I'd definitely make the switch to one of the WinCE devices with even a tiny keyboard, and probably be able to use for for most
    • XWindows is not painful at any resolution by itself. The problem are the window manager, widgets, etc. It's perfectly possible to write a program that looks well when run on X at 320x200.

    • Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LizardKing ( 5245 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @01:39PM (#6139395)

      why would you install *nix/BSD on a palmtop?

      For similar reasons that my company installs it on haldheld devices I guess. We run a minimal installation, including X, and write apps using the fltk toolkit. OK, you're not going to run OpenOffice or Mozilla on the things, but for specialised applications (warehouse management in our case), they work well. And it's a damned sight nicer programming a NetBSD app than a Windows CE one (the handhelds come preloaded with WinCE).

      Chris

    • In my case a 256cf and NetBSD took my IBM z50 [ebay.com] from a completely unsupported and worthless POS running on chip WinCE 2.11 to a fully functional Unix laptop that will run for 16hours on one battery.
      I can run X11 native and remote, dillo, wardriving tools, and apache.

    • See, this is the thing I've never understood - why would you install *nix/BSD on a palmtop? Most of the apps out there are not designed for such a small screen

      Because *some* of the apps are designed for such a small screen. Also, if you had the skill to port UNIX to the PDA then you probably have the skill to code up the apps you need as well.

    • Well, NetBSD installs on a huge variety of software. Once that's been installed, you can proceed to install the apps that you need. I've installed on a 1 Gig disk before (with X), so 512 megs are not so bad, if you forget about X. What would you need for work? Email, perhaps some sort of instant messaging capabilities, ability to take notes, etc... personally, I'd rather not be bothered all the time with pages and so forth, but if you have to do it, might as well make it easier on yourself. Give up X Win
    • Why do you think we chose to go to the moon?

  • Right... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Malicious ( 567158 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @11:55AM (#6139032)
    When asked to comment why he wanted to install BSD on a Palmtop, Michael Lucas responded 'The Devil made me do it'
  • For those of you out there who own a Compaq/HP iPAQ, and would like to run an Open-source OS on it, it is currently possibly to run Linux on it, thanks to HP's Cambridge Research Labs, and of course many contributors around the world. For more, please visit Handhelds.org [handhelds.org]. (For what it's worth, I am the person who is porting Linux to the iPAQ h1910 - and no, I am not paid by HP.)

    ~pi/joshua/nontoxic/whatever
  • Welcome to Adobe GoLive 6

    Here [ebay.com] is an IBM z50 with 265mg cf preloaded with NetBSD!!! Instant WarDriving!!!

    A link [209.194.1.10] on the page leads to the z50 serving a stats site under apache!!!!

    • "Thats right I have a IBM z50 serving a webpage using apache. Stats are gathered every 5min using a perl script and page is generated. I think my 128k dsl upload would choak before the z50 died but please do not post this link to slashdot.

      Thanks,

      Codeman"

      Lets just hope we dont /. his thinkpad now...

  • Phenom Ultra (Score:2, Interesting)

    by hiroshi912681 ( 589840 )
    NetBSD supposedly supports the Hitachi PERSONA HPW-230JC, which is the 32 meg version of what I have, a Phenom Ultra. But, the funny thing is... the bootloader program is only for Windows CE 2.11, not 2.0 that the machines come with (so, I can't even test it). I've gone through hell trying to find an open source operating system to run on this thing, with no dice. Anyone have one of these things?
    • If you dig a little, I think there is a version of the bootloader for LinuxSH3 that can be used to boot NetBSD.

      Good luck!

  • Zaurus port (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mivok ( 621790 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @04:56PM (#6140036) Homepage
    I'm curious.. has anybody tried porting this to the Sharp Zaurus (SL-5500g is what I have, but any model)? And if not.. how hard would it be?

    • I'd like to see that -- but I've looked, with no luck.

      The NetBSD/hpcarm page [netbsd.org] lists the iPaq H3600 as a supported model -- it's at least got the same CPU as the SL-5500. I'd give it a shot on my Zaurus, but I haven't figured out how to load the kernel -- all the bootloaders are written with WinCE in mind!

      • I've been thinking about it the past couple of days.. not had chance to have a look until after exams :(, but when you flash the zaurus rom (to say, openzaurus.. there are two files - a zImage (kernel), and an initrd.bin - the root filesystem (cramfs or jffs2).

        At a guess, I'd say you could attempt to rename the kernel image to zImage, and build a root filesystem from whichever install sets you want (on the desktop), and put that filesystem as the initrd.bin), flash, and it would load. I doubt the IPAQ kern
        • I think that may work -- If I get a chance next week, I may give it a try to. Although, I finally got OpenZaurus installed & configured the way I wanted (including /opt mounted on ext2-formatted sd) and I am loathe to change it again.
  • Does anyone know of a linux or BSD distro that works on the new Dell Axim 300MHz and 400MHz machines? I'd *love* to get rid of Pocket PC 2003... :-)

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