Setting Up a Development Environment
I spent some time this weekend setting up a new PalmOS development environment. I have a couple if Linux machines, but my laptop was my only Windows machine (note the past tense). Unfortunately, the PalmOS Simulator is Windows only.
My first step was to try the simulator under WINE. It actually seemed to work half decently. It drew correctly, and responded fine. Except… it was causing it to bug out due to something memory related. After hitting “Ignore” a couple hundred of times in response to the System Fatal Alert while trying to get to the App Launcher, I figured it wasn’t going to be too practical.
I moved on to Qemu, which is a .. err.. platform emulator, in my particular case it was emulating an x86 platform. I started installing Windows 2000, and was quite impressed. Hours later I was a little less impressed, but held out hope. By the time I woke up I had a Windows machine running in an emulated environment on my Linux machine. It was a little slow but bearable. However, when I tried the simulator it was tripping out complaining about some DLLs. Tried to install the service pack, but that died for some unknown reason too. Kinda odd that it emulates a system well enough that you can use it to install, boot up, upgrade IE, yet there are still minor incompatibilies that break other apps in strange ways. Qemu is cool, and booting up Windows within Linux is cool, but it ended up proving rather useless. Maybe I’ll check it out again later.
That same night I was installing Windows 2000, I started setting up a machine from castaway parts. I ended up assembling a P3-500ish with some RAM, an 8 gig harddrive, and a CD drive. It ended up being faster than the Qemu environment (not that big of a shock). and of course it was able to run the simulator (which Wine and Qemu were not able to accomplish). I threw VNC on it, and now I VNC into it from my Linux desktop to do anything with it.
So my Palm development environment now looks like this: prc-tools and VIM under Linux, I drop my binaries in ~/public_html, switch over to VNC, download the new prc, load it in the simulator, test it out, repeat. Not ideal, but it’ll have to do for now.
August 17th, 2004 at 2:48 pm
I’ve been using VMware lately to build and test special boot CDs. I had a dream the other night where I was working in a virtual machine and formatted the drive, except it somehow formatted my entire drive instead of just the virtual machine drive. It scared me and now I’m paranoid about partitioning a virtual machine drive.
-Matt
August 19th, 2004 at 3:41 pm
I’ve just installed QEMU here on a MDK 10 box. Seems to be working well with Win98 as the OS running under the emulator.
It’s not rapid but then it’s only a Cel800 box with 256mb RAM and shared video. I’ve presently got it open twice (once via VNC over the network) and it’s running an accounting app ok in both instances - quite cool.
No problems with anything at this stage - I understand Win98 may be the better OS for QEMU at this stage, although there seems to be quite a bit of comment about that.
Luke.
August 23rd, 2004 at 12:41 am
I’ve just installed QEMU here on a MDK 10 box. Seems to be working well with Win98 as the OS running under the emulator.
It’s not rapid but then it’s only a Cel800 box with 256mb RAM and shared video. I’ve presently got it open twice (once via VNC over the network) and it’s running an accounting app ok in both instances - quite cool.
No problems with anything at this stage - I understand Win98 may be the better OS for QEMU at this stage, although there seems to be quite a bit of comment about that.
Luke.