On Wed, Nov 14, 2001 at 12:35:28PM -0800, "Akkana" wrote: > Michael Kjorling writes: >> Does anyone have any suggestion about a page that assumes that one >> knows _nothing_ about Palm programming, and explains how to get >> started? > > Joe Pfeiffer writes: >> The O'Reilly book is pretty good, as are the downloadable reference >> manuals from Palm. > > I didn't find that the O'Reilly book or the references on Palm's site > had any relevance whatsoever to developing on Linux with software you > can download today.
While it's CodeWarrior biased, and perhaps not the best book out there, I do think this book has relevance to Michael's "explain how to get started on *Palm OS programming*" needs. You can even read the first edition on the web. > I found the getting-started experience very frustrating, because every > document I found on the web described versions of the software which > were no longer available, I am surprised. How were you searching? I regularly search for "prc-tools" with Google, and my page and the Sourceforge pages hosting current prc-tools development are generally somewhere in the top five. Both my page and the palmos.com page that you say you read point directly to the Sourceforge pages. > and didn't address the fact that the PRC-tools > distribution and the SDK versions don't work together, Perhaps you could explain what you mean by this. The 3.5 SDK and especially the 4.0 SDK work perfectly out of the box with current versions of prc-tools on Linux. You are correct that the pages at http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/tools/gcc/ have been mostly trash ever since they were rewritten back in July. Those pages relate to prc-tools 2.0, which is quite out of date. Perhaps it would be helpful if you wrote to Palm asking them to actually support prc-tools 2.0 (by fixing its bugs and correcting the web page), as they say they do support 2.0 on that page, or to phase the page and their 2.0 support out entirely in favour of the more recent versions at Sourceforge. I know which one of those two sounds more logical to me! > I wrote up a page on my experiences, which may be helpful to you: > http://www.shallowsky.com/palmlinuxdev.html I have a few comments on your page. [Re Palm's GCC pages at www.palmos.com] | They don't work, do they? What is Palm thinking? I have no idea. Perhaps it would be useful if you sent your comments on this page direct to Palm. | I downloaded quite a few different versions of the prc-tools trying to | find one that works. I finally found working RPMs using RPMfind Perhaps it would be useful if you told us which ones these non-working versions are and sent notes to their distributors. The RPMs at rpmfind are links to the ones at prc-tools.sourceforge.net, which is itself IMHO reasonably easy to find. | Palm will imply that you should get the latest an greatest (currently, | 4.0); but, confusingly, their prctools page says that the prctools only | work with SDK 3.5. No, their prc-tools page says that the version of prc-tools *listed on their page*, namely 2.0, only works with the 3.5 SDK. (The current version, 2.0.92, works fine with both, and with the specially modified older ones.) | Even more confusingly, when you obligingly download one of those two | SDKs (no matter which one), you'll find that none of the prctools sample | apps will compile *Which* prc-tools sample apps? For example, the multiapp sample which comes with current prc-tools compiles with *any* SDK. | The samples that come with the SDK, of course, don't | compile because they're set up for CodeWarrior or something and don't even | have Makefiles. Several of them (not enough, to be sure) have makefiles and compile with prc-tools and pilrc. | Palm makes the older SDKs available for Windows and Mac, but not for | Linux. You can get the older include files in a linux tarball, but it | doesn't include the libraries, so it's basically useless. This is simply not true. The older SDKs (1, 2, 3.1 -- 3.0 ought to be in the list too, and that's on my to do list) were retropatched for GCC and are available for Unix from http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/tools/gcc/#sdk These old SDKs *didn't contain any libraries*. | I've mailed | people at Palm asking where to get the libraries, but they seem to have no | interest in supporting Linux developers. Frankly, if the tone of your email was similar to the tone of your web page, I'm not surprised they didn't go out of their way to help you. | One other question: would it be better to go with a Visor SDK? Not especially. If you want to do Visor development, you'll of course want to download Handspring's Visor-specific SDK, but it plugs into an SDK from Palm just fine. | They don't come with instructions on how to install them (of course). 4.0 | comes in a tarball which, when extracted, gives you a few useless | directories plus an RPM. I think you'll find that the obscurely named README file in one of those useless directories contains installation instructions. Of course, it's an RPM so there's really not much to it. | With either SDK, what you want to end up with is a directory called | /opt/palmdev/sdk-xx (where xx is 35 or 40). Close. xx is "3.5" or "4". | Some tools look in | /opt/palmdev, some look in /usr/local/palmdev. Choose one and make the | other a symlink. /opt/palmdev is what the builds I make are moving towards. The current version looks in /usr/local/palmdev as well automatically, and future versions will have ways to specify doing that. | Now the compiler (which calls a program called sdkfind) will look in the | appropriate directory BTW the details of sdkfind are going to go away in the near future, but the compiler will still look in all the appropriate directories. | I've tried quite a few versions of POSE and xpilot, with a ROM I | uploaded from my IIIxe using pi-getrom from the excellent pilot-link | tools, and haven't found anything that even comes close to working. Perhaps you could say something about what goes wrong. Most of us here are having no problems with current versions of Poser. | Some Links Is there a reason why http://prc-tools.sourceforge.net/ isn't on this list? Thank you for your web page. However, in general I wish that instead of writing dozens of howtos and complex install instructions and tucking them away in odd corners of the web, people would contact the maintainers and tell them what problems they have been having and maybe even help *improve* the installation procedures so that we wouldn't need so many howtos in the first place. John _______________________________________________ Pilot-unix mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hcirisc.cs.binghamton.edu/mailman/listinfo/pilot-unix
