[Klug-general] Linux phones

[Karl Lattimer]

On Thu, 2007-07-12 at 15:31 +0100, J D Freeman wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> On Thu, Jul 12, 2007 at 03:06:09PM +0100, Dan Attwood wrote:
> > My impending change of jobs will mean for the first time ever i'm going to
> > have ot pay for my mobile bills - oh the horror!
> 
> Shocking. Welcome to the real world.
> 
> > As a result i'm going to have to get a new phone and sim card. Ideally of
> > course i'd the like the phone to have good linux support for backing up
> > numbers, shifting pics around etc via bluetooth. And of course in a perfect
> > world the phone it's self would be running linux as well. The phone will
> > also have to be on the vodapahone network as thats what my partner has and
> > we want to take advantage of her free minutes.
> >
> > Does anyone have any suggestions?
> 
> Nokia. 

Yep nokia is your best bet. OpenMoko just isn't mature enough, and I
don't think it actually has opensync or syncml support yet.

"
> Linux is a general purpose OS
> which works well on general purpose computers, 
"

That's a logical fallacy if ever I saw one! Just because Linux is a
general purpose OS doesn't mean it should be used on general purpose
computers.

In point of fact, general purpose OS generally means something which can
easily be transported across architectures.

> Whilst its not open source (boo his) Epoc is a
> far better OS for this sort of platform. That said I quite like VX works
> for embedded stuff, but thats mainly cos its very well tried and tested
> (hint the two nasa mars rovers run on it IIRC). 

WRT VXworks and Epoc, Epoc isn't exactly alive is it, last release IIRC
was in 2003 running on the psion revo. Which was actually a general
purpose computer built on a OS which was designed for low power embedded
applications, doesn't have a full API stack, you must re-invent the
wheel in order to get much custom stuff working on it. Do they even sell
licenses for Epoc32 anymore? As PSION are out of business and Symbian is
the evolved version of Epoc.
VXworks is even worse, a friend of mine who works with both ucLinux,
Linux 2.6 for embedded and VXworks daily does nothing but complain about
how many missing kernel level and user space API's there are. For
instance you'll find that there is no such thing as libc on VXworks,
they have a base library set, but it doesn't cut the mustard. VXworks is
crippleware essentially which means the developer needs to do a lot more
work in order to get something running.

Compare this with Linux running on embedded devices, Linux has an
enormous library of tools and apis which can be implemented by a
programmer on any platform thanks to GCC/glibc and the way the Linux
kernel is developed. 

With all that said, 80% of new photocopiers run Linux, 80% of network
printers run linux, 80% of soho routers run linux. Thats the 80/20 rule
for you, with a larger developer community, a larger API stack, many
embedded device stack elements etc... I think that its a better bet for
Linux to run on all hardware than VXworks or Epoc and I think you'll
find that 8 out of 10 developer cats agree. 

K,