[linuxsh-dev] What we've been working on - revealed!

[Mitch D. <md...@po...>]

Hi everyone,

Some of you might remember that in May, I sent some mail to the 
list saying I had joined Pocket Penguins.

  http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/3076/2000/5/0/3818679/

I was joined at the time by Greg Banks, who some of you know from
the m17n2000 conference last March.

Because of commercial sensitivity, we've not been able to talk about
what we've been working on until now.  Finally the time has come
when we can share it with you.

For the last ten weeks, Greg and I have been working pretty
intensively on porting Linux to a Hitachi SH4-powered computer, the
Industrial Digital Assistant.

  http://www.pocketpenguins.com/rockwell_ppi.html
  http://www.dmida.com

It's been pretty intense for us - 60-90 hour weeks every week, and
plenty of really really fun stuff for us to do.  We've had our share
of showstopper problems, but the Rockwell DataMyte people have bent
over backwards to help us do this port, something almost unheard of
in the Linux world.

Also, a big thank you to all the people who have contributed to
the Linux on SuperH project: Once we were able to load programs
onto the board, it took just two days to get the core kernel and
usermode programs running.  Now *that's* portable!

Our board now runs X-Windows, with a touchscreen, virtual keyboard
and fvwm95.  It has wireless networking, and today we ran it for
nearly three hours and the battery was still more than half full.
It's really cool to be able to surf SlashDot and other sites using
the stylus!!

Pocket Penguins recently ran advertisements in selected trade papers.
FYI, I have attached one of the two that ran in the Nov '00 issue of
Linux Journal.

If anyone is visiting Comdex Las Vegas this year, you can see our
handiwork at the Rockwell DataMyte stand, S1077.

Regards,

Mitch and Greg.