Compaq’s Approach to Linux in Your Hand
While the Palm has always been the top dog of palmtops for Linux users and Yopy (see “Linley on Linux”, LJ, September 2000) is the first kid on the block with Linux inside, there is Linux brewing at Compaq as well. iPaq, the handheld pocket PC from Compaq, should have the attention of most Linux lovers. While the shipping version runs Windows Pocket PC, getting a Linux version of this 200MHz handheld with 32MB of flash RAM is as easy as surfing to the Compaq web site. And what’s more, the iPaq owes its very existence to open source and Linux in general, and a research project called “Itsy” in specific.
As Dick Greeley, program manager for the Open Handheld program and a member of Compaq’s Corporate Research team, said in a recent interview, Compaq’s study of handheld computing devices—seeing what it was that made them so popular and what could be done to improve on some of the product’s deficiencies—had it origins not in Compaq, but in Digital Equipment Corporation, which Compaq acquired in 1998. Getting Digital’s significant research labs as part of the bargain, Compaq became the home for Digital’s “Itsy” project. The “Itsy” project was an attempt to marshal many of the technological innovations in computing power, screen quality and memory capacity for the burgeoning handheld computer market. It is this project, started four years ago, that eventually produced the iPaq.
“Our goal in research,” said Dick Greeley, “is to look into the future, to look beyond the time horizon of the existing business units, so to that extent, we’re looking out further than a lot of these groups do.” What he and his researchers saw was that issues of power management and user interface were key to developing handhelds that would be