Suitable hardware for RISC OS - Nokia 770

I’d usually not make such suggestions, since so many similar (but unsuitable) suggestions have been made in the past. However, this one seems particularly suitable to porting RISC OS to:

http://www.buy.com/prod/nokia-770-internet-tablet-internet-tablet-2006-software-edition/q/loc/101/204081472.html

And at US$140, the price is certainly right. It has a Texas Instruments OMAP 1710, which is an ARM9 device. It runs ARM Linux, provided by Nokia, which is a long way towards understanding how it works.

Of course, there would still be a substantial amount of work to make drivers work for RISC OS, but nevertheless, it has more than enough CPU and RAM to make it a very reasonable target. There’s also a later version, the N800, which is a little over US$300.

I’ve never used an N770, but it does indeed look like an impressive device that would be very cool to have. I would certainly put some money towards getting RO working on it.

For similar reasons: http://www.openmoko.org/

Of course, there are now loads and loads of ARM devices out there now, but some are rather less suitable than others, and I’d caution the lay user against naming random devices because they “might be suitable”. Indeed in the case of the 770 above, there are some components it would be very difficult or impossible to make work on RISC OS such as the wireless interface (closed drivers) – that doesn’t rule it out entirely. The device OpenMoko presently runs on OTOH, is as open as possible. Still, there’d be a huge range of problems to be solved for a mobile RISC OS device, and I fear, way too little developer time is available for such things when there are so many other important problems to be solved.

Still, there’d be a huge range of problems to be solved for a mobile RISC OS device, and I fear, way too little developer time is available

Well, Steve estimated around 2 or 3 man-months here: https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/2/topics/8

Adam

Yes, but read the post in full. It specifics a number of things which are all unlikely to be true in practice. A year is a more reasonable amount of time, maybe longer depending on who you get interested. Most of the people who are real familiar with RISC OS 5 internals are presently at ROOL.