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At the 2007 Worldwide Newton Conference in Tokyo on July 8th, Paul Guyot announced that his most excellent Newton Emulator for ARM, Einstein, was now open source and available immediately on Google Code. His announcement to the NewtonTalk mailing list is worth the read. One improvement that sounds enticing:
“the heavy work done these past weeks allowed me to design a new experimental module where NewtonOS instructions are executed natively on ARM PDAs. “
There have been other improvements to Einstein since last year- the biggest (to me) is the ability to cross-compile and build Einstein on your Mac while targeting the Nokia 770. No more waiting for binaries to be released. The 800 was tested and the binary didn’t run– ITOS2007 has some different libraries (from ITOS 2005 and 2006), which probably caused issues. I’m attempting to roll a build for my 770 this weekend. We’ll see how it goes.
Here are my screen shots of my 770 from the release of Einstein last year.
Also announced was the release of Driver Labo, the wifi drivers for Newton by Hiroshi Noguchi. AFAIK, these are the only available drivers in the world that support WEP on the Newton. I had purchased licenses back when they were available, but since 2005 Hiroshi hadn’t ever responded to requests and pleas to accept payment for new licenses. As a result many Newtons can’t participate in locked-down Wifi networks. The release of these drivers as Open Source is a welcome event.
There is an overview of the WWNC ’07 with some pictures of course.
we zaurus users are also very interested in this!
I’m hoping to build this OpenEinstein binary (so far not happening) so that I can put my Nokia 770 to good use. If it works, it will permanently run OpenEinstein. Haven’t used the 770 much. I’d use it a bit more if OE runs decently on it. Which should happen much faster now, with other code contributions.
I guess the biggest job at hand isn’t so much the optimisation of OpenEinstein for the ITOS platform, but rather the implementation of Paul’s other baby, Relativity.
Without Relativity, OpenEinstein is an interesting, but very limited platform: We need the hardware abstraction layers that Relativity provides to be able to use all the hardware on the Internet Tablets.
I really wish I had some money to give to Paul; it’s about the only useful thing I’m able to do to expediate OpenEinstein’s development…
Still: Jay Newton! Eh?