Hi,

I'm the proud new owner of one of the cheap monochrome iPaq handhelds.
Well, I will be proud when it runs a real OS.

I went ahead and put the kernel on a 32MB compactflash card installed in
the CF expansion backpack. It boots quite happily, though it appears to
assume 32MB of DRAM and a color screen. I have 16MB of DRAM and a 16
greyscale screen- same resolution, though. It also recognizes the
compactlfash card. I presume that the memory and screen type are
hardcoded in?

I'm wondering, how much further can I get with this device? Skimming the
source via cvsweb, I didn't see any mention of mono support. Is it
present/imagined/being worked on, or is this something that I should
start to work on myself?

Since I don't have a color device to test on, I can't figure out how
much of the code is actually working, or how much is currently in
progress - I'd hate to spend a long time trying to add mono support to
the color code only to discover that it wasn't working because of a bug
elsewhere in code I presumed to be working. What is actually functional
on the color devices?

Finally, an idea I have for the console. For character by character
entry, I am a big fan of gesture input, with graffiti on the Newton
MessagePad (and, later, PalmOS) being a prime example. I was thinking of
a console driver which would take over the entire screen, and would let
you use gesture strokes to input characters. Not a hugely revolutionary
project, but it'll probably be the first thing I work on once I get the
screen to function.

I must admit at this point to having very little NetBSD experience, and
pretty much no internals knowledge of it. I have low level coding
experience, and don't think that I'll have trouble picking it up, but
right now my knowledge is very limited.

Thanks,

gopi.



[       Gopi Flaherty       |   "...and if I opened my heart to you     ]
[    gf2e@andrew.cmu.edu    |        and showed you my weak side,       ]
[ Computer Science Major    |             what would you do?"           ]
[ Author of NewtKey, the Newton Keyboard driver for Newtons with OS 1.x ]
[     Check out http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/usr/gf2e/newtkey      ]
[  (c) Gopi Flaherty 2001 Not for distribution on the Microsoft Network ]