About Open Handhelds
History
At Compaq, work on Open Handhelds began with several projects at the Western Research Lab and Systems Research Center that built small devices running open source operating systems. Itsy, the latest such device, runs Linux. Paraphrasing from the Itsy project page: When it was first produced, it offered considerably more computing power and memory than other PDA's, enabling demanding applications such as speech recognition, MPEG viewing, and playing Doom. See http://research.compaq.com/wrl/projects/Itsy/itsy.html for more information.
The Skiff project at Cambridge Research Laboratory, while not a handheld, was helped by sharing source code and toolchains from the Itsy project. Recently, members of Compaq Research (from CRL, WRL, SRC, Palo Alto Advanced Development and Software Engineering Australia) formed a group to promote open source handhelds. The initial task was to port Linux 2.3.latest to Skiff, Itsy, and the iPaq 3600. The latter was most important because it would be the most widely available open handheld.
Who is working on Open Handhelds
Although our efforts to date have been centered around Linux, we expect the BSD's to join the fold shortly.
There are probably too many people working on Open Handhelds to list them all here (but see HandheldsPeople for an attempt).
Moreover, the list of individuals contributing their work and showing interest in our effort is growing continuously.
Other contributors to the effort, directly or indirectly, just to name a few:
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Linus Torvalds - Linux
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Russell M. King - the maintainer of the ARM port of Linux
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Nicolas Pitre (nico@cam.org) - maintainer of StrongARM SA1100 support for Linux.
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Erik Mouw (J.A.K.Mouw@its.tudelft.nl) - LART, SA1100 based handheld and more to come...
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Jamey Hicks (jamey.hicks@hp.com) - Ported kernel to ipaq h3600, initial 2.6 ipaq kernel porting, handhelds.org project leader
