Jim Cooper wrote: > Jay Ts wrote: > >and you get a very advanced operating system > > "Advanced"? Unix is a very old-fashioned operating system.
The Tao is the most ancient thing. Yet is supports the most advanced master. And thus it also is with Unix. The ancient is also the most advanced. :-) > But in any case, you just have yet another GUI toolkit. What is going to > convince people to use it? We will have to wait and see what Palmsource delivers, but I doubt there will be "yet another GUI toolkit". More likely, I think the first version of Palm OS on Linux will simply be Palm OS running in a virtual machine, and have a nearly identical API for the developers. > The pendulum for PDA development is very much > swinging the way of Windows Mobile, and putting a Palm-lookalike GUI layer > on top of Linux is going to be seen by many as yet another nail in the > coffin of the PalmOS, because there will no longer be a PalmOS. I agree! And I hope that the people at Palmsource do as well. > >If they do things intelligently, it will be possible to run most > >or all of the existing Palm OS apps on the Linux-based system > > The only possible way to do that would be to use emulators, the same way > they do on PalmOS 5 devices. That's what I expect. But keep in mind an important difference: in order to emulate a 68k processor on a RISC CPU, a full emulation is required. Every 68k instruction must be translated into a RISC instruction, which is a very slow process. But if you're emulating system calls through another OS, all that's needed is to catch the system calls and translate them to the Linux system calls. There is some overhead in the emulation layer, but it's much quicker than translating every CPU instruction. > >(Now, I hope that wasn't just wishful thinking. > > I very much fear it is. Porting a desktop/server OS to a PDA still strikes > me as fundamentally wrong. I agree, and that's why I'm pretty sure they aren't going to try it. I explained this in more detail in a message I posted a few minutes ago. Actually, a full installation of SuSE 10.0 wouldn't even fit on a LifeDrive -- it takes up 7 GB of disk space, to say nothing about the RAM required to run an X server and KDE desktop! And running KDE on a 320x320 screen? Let's not even go there. > That's why so many of MS's efforts in this arena > were crap (and even now taints some aspects of Windows Mobile) Again, I agree. But don't compare Windows to the Linux kernel! They are fundamentally different. Windows has been developed in such a way that the GUI cannot be separated from the rest of the system. Windows simply does not scale well (either up or down) to systems that aren't Intel desktops or servers. It's just not in the design. > > I wish they would put a lot more effort into improving PODS! > > PODS sucks big time. You're far too kind in your comments about it :-) Probably because I've never seen Codewarrior, and I prefer to do my builds by typing 'make all', like on Linux. As long as I have all my Unix text processing and development utils, I see absolutely no need for any IDE. I've tried using a few, but they just slow me down. Ok, so I'm not a typical Palm OS programmer! Aside from that, I've been through the wringer a few times with PODS, and as a result of being pretty frustrated, but later figuring out how to make it work (sometimes almost by mistake!), I now have a pretty good handle on it. It's not the best, but it does basically work. > PODS seems almost universally reviled, OK, I don't want to debate this at all. This is a *major* issue that Palmsource absolutely needs to deal with. I have to admit that if the only reason I can put up with it is that I'm an expert Unix user/programmer, then things are really bad. ;-) Jay Ts -- For information on using the PalmSource Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
