[geeks] HP Journada 720 - $75 (Refurbished, after rebate)

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 01:17:17PM -0400, velociraptor wrote:
> I replaced the other half's Palm that went belly up and my own Treo
> 600 with two HP iPaq 2215's.  I checked into the possibility of Linux,
> but to be honest, I haven't been tempted.  Other than getting a bad
> battery in one initially, they have been very well behaved.  And with
> a native Nethack binary, I don't have much else to ask for--and it
> performs fine.

....
> My main use has been reading ebooks, and "mindless games" while
> listening to podcasts (I can't read and listen to podcasts at the same
> time).  It does seem to have problems with large ebooks (e.g. the 5th
> Harry Potter book, for example, 700+ pgs) in MS Reader (presumably
> trying to load the whole thing into memory or something equally
> stupid).  I haven't tried any other readers yet.  The Acroread for
> PDAs (both Palm and Pocket Windows) sucks absolute canal water.

I have no idea if you could get it to work, but I've had lots of luck
using Damn Small Linux (aka DSL) running from a USB stick on an X86
based handheld device.* DSL is a variant of KNOPPIX. Knoppix uses a
simple linux device driver to mount a compressed file system.

I assume if you can boot linux on it, you could modify the driver (if
any mod was needed at all) to load on an ARM processor. I expect that
a little bit of constructive hacking would do all you need. 

Without the compression, you could still run linux or xBSD on it, and
mount the memory card as a read only file system. If you have enough RAM,
then it would be relatively easy to run Xpdf or any other reader. 

The biggest problem is to get the reader to interpret your key presses
to do things you want. You can remap key events to a different key event
pretty easily, but emulating varying input devices is extremly difficult
and I have a patent pending on doing just that.

I know comparing X86 instructions with ARM instructions not very usefull,
but I've been able to combile DSL and debian and get 450 meg file system,
complete with 250 megs of games onto a 256meg USB memory stick with about
50 meg left over. 

I only had a problem with one particular game in two versions that need
to have the main data file writeable. Since DSL nicely provided a RAM disk,
that was taken care of.

Besides the usual DSL stuff (most of which was disabled), I've gotten
DOSEMU and WINE running, two different flash players, and a bunch of
games. DSL came with XMMS, so if I could come up with a music menu
system, I could use it as an MP3/MP4 sound and video player.

* Don't ask where you can get one, I probably have the only two in 
  existance. :-) We are looking for funding to build them.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667  Fax ONLY: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 
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