Palm OS-based handhelds have become common place on university campuses.  Carrying a price tag of $150 or less many students have found room in their budgets to give one of these PDAs a home.  Anyone who has spent a little time looking into the options for PDAs have either seen or heard rumors of beautiful full-color PDAs. Compaq iPAQ (running Microsoft Pocket PC) is by far the most popular of these, but with its price tag of $500 or more its widespread appeal has been limited. This may be changing; however, as second generation Win CE and Pocket PC based devices hit the market. New releases such as the Compaq iPAQ, HP Jornada, and Cassiopea will usher in a new wave of handheld computing power and drive down prices for older models.

     With handheld computers having survived now into at least their third generation, an interesting development has taken place-the choice of operating systems. Currently only available on the Compaq iPAQ, at least 6 different Linux distributions have surfaced for this handheld powerhouse.

     Compaq itself is putting in a significant amount of energy towards making Linux a viable alternative for these machines. Compaq sponsors www.handhelds.org which serves as a central resource for the Linux-on-handhelds initiative hosting a SourceForge server and other goodies.

     I have yet to experiment with this myself, but from what I can tell it looks to be the real deal. Once you get Linux up and running you can telnet into your handheld from your desktop and feel right at home with your remote shell access. X Windows is coming along nicely with a number of different window managers available. Handwriting recognition (xscribble) and even some PIM software (calendar, contacts, tasks, etc.) is available.

     The Linux option is still lacking as a viable day-to-day alternative for use with your handheld, but it's an initiative that is worth keeping an eye on. At the least it could provide a very interesting platform for project development. I wonder if anyone has gotten a web server up and running on one of these? If so, with a network connection and a little serial port magic this could provide an excellent means of web-based remote control or data collection.

     If you found this article interesting, come to SIGMobile at 2pm on Saturdays. We are always looking for new people to get involved with our projects. Right now our major development are PDA controlled laser tag robots.