Interview: Harald Welte (part 1)

Posted Jun 16, 2006 17:39 UTC (Fri) by mogul (guest, #3163)
Parent article: Interview: Harald Welte (part 1)

Nice to see this happening.

I'd also like information on the similar project to get a fully-featured environment Linux running on the Palm Treo 650, which has tons of potential. The Treo has a keyboard, bluetooth, mouse (stylus), IR, and there's even an SD WiFi card available. The existence of Palm emulators for Linux means that in addition to Linux binaries, a hacked Treo can run all the myriad existing Palm software, even stuff sitting in the original firmware, when the need arises. (Oh MetrO, where would I be without you? Probably rotting dead in a London sewer somewhere...)

There's a bunch of info here:
http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/PalmTreo650

...but I'm not seeing a feed or some other way to easily keep up with changes. One thing to note, though, is that this port is already able to dial the phone...!

As it stands, I already use the Treo 650 in place of numerous devices: Phone, USB thumbdrive (via Softick cardexport and bluefiles/obexfs), eBook reader, music player, video player (TCPMP), RSS reader (via Bloglines), etc. Not only does it do these things, but it does them so well that I feel dumb carrying around a PSP, which only does half those things, and rather poorly (the PSP is great at games, which the Treo is not, however).

Things it doesn't do well? The ssh clients out there suck. The only decent XMPP client is proprietary and also fairly suck (Chatopus). The web browser sucks for any but the most basic sites, and half my life is now server-side in Web 2.0 services (del.icio.us, gmail, google calendar, etc). While existing Linux apps for this kind of stuff are not intended for a mobile environment, I'd much rather start hacking there doing things like contributing to Minimo (mobile Firefox) than try to figure out how to write a better-than-stock web browser from scratch for Palm OS.

Joe Bob says check it out...