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by znpy 2518 days ago
I used to run NetBSD/hpcarm and JLime Linux on an HP Jornada 728 in high school.

Those were cool, but in retrospect they did not make sense at all.

Someone was developing a flashrom board for the Jornada 728 that would have greatly improved GNU/Linux support -- including real sleep and truly long battery life. Sadly they never delivered.
1 comments
rjsw 2518 days ago
HP had internal versions of the Jornada 72[0,8] that used flash instead of mask ROM, they could run the handhelds.org distribution of Linux.
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znpy 2518 days ago
Any chance of having one of said flash boards? Or the design files?
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rjsw 2517 days ago
I didn't work for HP and have never seen a flash Jornada 720. I think they were just manufactured with Intel StrataFlash on the main board instead of mask ROM.

The early iPAQ models had Windows CE in flash, so you could easily overwrite it. Back then NetBSD didn't have a flash filesystem so NetBSD/hpcarm just booted from WinCE and ran in RAM.

The handhelds.org distribution was a DEC/Compaq/HP project that initially targeted their Itsy [1] device, then added support for their commercial products as they were released. Later they allowed external contributions too. They build an iPAQ sleeve that contained accelerometers to be able to carry on the UI development from the Itsy, you scrolled the screen by tilting the device. Their Linux kernel did have a fair bit of power management built in.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itsy_Pocket_Computer

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