Linux for handhelds: fact or fiction?

Introduction

With the recent news of the successful lawsuit between Microsoft and the U.S. Justice Department, many are wondering what other alternatives exist to the Microsoft regime. One such alternative is Linux. Is Linux produced by a major corporation? Does it require the very latest hardware, and offer a wide variety of pretty, yet useless features? Indeed, what does Linux even stand for? These are questions commonly asked by users encountering Linux for the first time.

The answer to the first two of these questions is surprisingly: 'no'. The answer to the last is somewhat more interesting. It seems that right from the offset Linux's creator, Linus Torvalds, did not even consider Linux to be a profit-making endeavour. Perhaps one of the attributes to Linux's successes is that from the beginning it was (and still is) freely available through the Internet. Linux's source was made freely available, and hence other people could work on it, make suggestions for changes and help improve the project.

Linux has grown up since these early days and is now a product that has Microsoft worried about the PC operating system market. Not happy with their threat on the PC market, Linux has its eyes on other platforms. In fact, Linux being available for a wide variety of platforms is nothing new. It has been available for a number of Macintosh, Acorn and workstation platforms for a good deal of its life.

The Linux7k Project

One such project to port Linux to another platform is Linux7k. The platform that has been targeted by '7k is (somewhat surprisingly) the Psion Series 5 handheld. In fact "7k" refers to 7110, the base motherboard and chip for the Psion device.

With today's rapid increase in power in the desktop market, clearly this power propagates down through the market to handheld devices. The Series 5 Classic has a processor equivalent to a 486sx. It also has 4MB or (more commonly) 8MB of internal memory used as RAM and storage space. This may very well seem small, however the device can also accomodate the industry standard Compact Flash slot, accepting up to 128MB storage cards.

The origin of Linux, although written for Intel workstations, is that of a server operating system. One concern many have about Linux7k is the idea of putting what is basically a server operating system on a palmtop. The solution is simple, when considering that Linux is backward compatible to its origins of an 80386 architecture machine. It possible to run Linux on a 386 machine - why not a palmtop? We have already discussed the increasing power of such machines. The Linux kernel lends itself to scaling also. Since it is possible to recompile the kernel from source, it is possible to compile-out unused capabilities, such as SCSI support. This streamlining of the kernel is extremely important in producing a memory-efficient port.