PalmOS Emulation

[fredoll]

Why not port a version of POSE (Palm OS Emulator) that would help the palm users switchers use some of their applications while waiting for native corresponding applications ...
Fred

[Wesley]

Sounds good to me. Any developers want to look at it?

[ArnimS]

I'm surprised there isn't more interest in this.

The source for POSE seems to be hosted at sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pose/

I'll take a look at it...

(edit)

OK looks like you can get palmos 4.12 for POSE emulator here

https://www.developerpavilion.com/palmos/page.asp?page_id=364

(Rom Images -> Release .zip)

POSE needs FLTK, which isn't part of maemo, so the UI needs hildonization

(edit)

FLTK 1.1 builds fine in scratchbox, but the deb package wants debhelper 5.. so i just ran make-install.

POSE needs to be patched for FLTK 1.1

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1197981&group_id=2189&atid=302189

(edit)

Pose PalmOS emulator built and running on Nokia 770!

Temp link:
http://ln-s.net/Nr7

(edit)
To run it untar the tgz to /home/user or somewhere else (not on MMC) and run
./pose PalmOS412_FullRel_EZ_enUS.rom

[ArnimS]

Thanks to unique311, who found the following link for PalmOS roms (including the 505 colored OS!

http://www.mobilefan.net/Palm-OS.nsf/Download-Free-Software/ROM-Replacement

[pycage]

Very nice, thanks for the port! I'm running it right now on my N800. :)

Can POSE rotate the screen by 90° or will this remain a dream?

[Adam_n800]

Any screenshots available? :D

What exactly can you do with this emulation?
Is it a complete emulation of the Palm OS UI.
I have a sony clie nr70v running Palm OS 4 but only really use it as a remote. Maemo is so much better than Palm OS. I hated that bottom middle section for handwriting, took up so much room.

[ArnimS]

It runs the apps delivered with PALM OS. We're testing a couple of 3rd party apps tonight.

Text input right now works best with a BT keyboard - but handwriting recognition works (albeit poorly).

We could use Palm-savvy testers, and developers for hildonization/optimization. Garage page is up.

https://garage.maemo.org/projects/pose/

Arnim

[ArnimS]

Just had to give you a screenshot.

http://home.arcor.de/arnim.sauerbier/POSE_0_01_Nokia_770.jpg

Clearly display size is an issue, as is text input. Just rotating the display isn't enough, if the goal is to enter text with the stylus.

Any ideas how text input could be best accomplished? It wouldn't be easy to hook-into the emulator itself to detect when a text input field is clicked, so some kind of always-on-screen keyboard would be needed.

Right now i imagine it'd work best rotated and double-sized, with a custom keyboard handled by the application itself. Here's a 'gimp' of what i was thinking...
http://home.arcor.de/arnim.sauerbier/POSE_0_01_Nokia_770_rot_kbd.jpg

Alternatively, maybe a rotated native maemo type kbd... Is there any work being done on a rotated hildon / maemo keyboard popup?

[BlueSpyder]

As a long time Palm user (since 1997), I find this to be one of the most beautiful ports I've seen for the N770. ;-)

ArnimS, I like your idea of rotating and double sizing POSE. If Graffiti recognition is problematic, then an add-on keyboard for POSE would sure be nice for those of us without bluetooth keyboards.

I note from the screenshot above that skins are working. Is there a "trick" to this? For me, POSE complains about not finding skins and then uses the default generic skin.

Thanks very, very much for making the port available.

BlueSpyder

[nspeer]

Great idea! There were quite a few Palm apps that I used to use before switching to my 770. I would love to be able to use them again. Question:
how does one install Palm apps with this POSE app for the 770/800?

thanks,
neil

[ArnimS]

As a long time Palm user (since 1997), I find this to be one of the most beautiful ports I've seen for the N770. ;-)
ArnimS, I like your idea of rotating and double sizing POSE. If Graffiti recognition is problematic, then an add-on keyboard for POSE would sure be nice for those of us without bluetooth keyboards.


Thanks, the handwriting recognition works somewhat, but is too slow to be accurate on the 770.


I note from the screenshot above that skins are working. Is there a "trick" to this? For me, POSE complains about not finding skins and then uses the default generic skin.

I only included a couple of basic skins. POSE tries to find a skin matching your OS version, and if it can't find it will default to a basic skin. You can download skins via your favorite linux distro, or for e.g. from here:

http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/contrib/p/pose-skins/pose-skins_1.9.orig.tar.gz


Thanks very, very much for making the port available.
BlueSpyder

You're welcome. I'm glad you appreciate this pre-release. Free feel to register on the garage page or send me a private message if you can test this emulator regularly. Since i have no experience with the palm, you could really help move this along.

[jdr93]

Great idea! There were quite a few Palm apps that I used to use before switching to my 770. I would love to be able to use them again. Question:
how does one install Palm apps with this POSE app for the 770/800?

thanks,
neil
ditto
ditto

john

[jdr93]

when i attempt to untar the pose_nokia_770_2006.tbz file i get an "invalid tar magic" message. i downloaded the file into /media/mmc1 and attempted to untar into /home/user as was suggested.

[linuxbear]

Hi,
It looks like the long awaited linux platform for the palm might be completed. It will be interesting to see if they develope a device for it. Also, from what I understand they will be open sourcing the OS and a virtual machine called Garnet VM to allow palm aps to be used on a linux platform. This would be great if it works as Garnet is the latest version of the Palm OS. Yhis might be currently developers only, I am not sure as I haven't had the time to read everything, but it looks interesting.

Here's a blurb from the website:

ACCESS Garnet™ VM Compatibility Kit
ACCESS Garnet VM provides the ability to run existing ACCESS Garnet™ OS (formerly known as Palm OS® Garnet™) applications on the ACCESS Linux Platform. As part of the Early ACCESS program, the ACCESS Developer Network has released the ACCESS Garnet™ VM Compatibility Kit to a group of leading Palm OS® developers for external testing and validation. The ACCESS Garnet VM Compatibility Kit is a stand-alone kit enabling developers to test their ACCESS Garnet OS-based applications' compatibility with ACCESS Linux Platform. I wonder if this VM will run on the Internettablet? I think the VM can be downloaded.

Glen

[linuxbear]

also a release doc from Access

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=CMPTW_inter.story&STORY=/www/story/02-12-2007/0004525010&EDATE=MON+Feb+12+2007,+03:00+AM

[TA-t3]

I tried the emulator. Is it supposed to work as good on the N800 as on the 770? Here's my short test review:
- I have tested with the PalmOS412 ROM image from palmsource/access
- When it first started it appeared to work ok after I passed through the initial display calibration sequence
- However, I could only see the upper part of the emulator, the input area and a bit of the display was below the lower part of the (landscape mode) screen, nothing at all like the jpg's I found at the download site, where the whole PDA was visible. Full screen/zoom buttons don't work.
- How to rotate to portrait mode? One of the demo images was rotated. Couldn't find a way to rotate.
- The initial try was otherwise successful. Could run the todo app. and other built-in apps.
- It doesn't work after the initial try. It starts up, but doesn't go any further, and is unresponsive. I had an ssh login and 'top' showed 99% CPU. Killed it. Removed anything new I could find in /home/user/, which was a .poserc file (or some such, IIRC), and tried again. Same thing.
- Other than that, I'm a bit unsure about the skins. I believe I have installed them correctly, but it doesn't seem to be possible to select anything - I see only two: Standard English and generic (IIRC, the last test was a couple of hours ago).

Other: When it worked, it was great (apart from the display problem), this is something I would really like to use. I would love to run the couple of simple, but essential applications that I still use my Palm PDA for. Then the N800 would truly replace my T3 (and I could change my nick.. ;))

[TA-t3]

when i attempt to untar the pose_nokia_770_2006.tbz file i get an "invalid tar magic" message. i downloaded the file into /media/mmc1 and attempted to untar into /home/user as was suggested.

You should unpack it on a desktop computer. You need 'bunzip2' installed, it's a bzip2 compressed tar file.

This will work on a Linux computer: tar jxvf pose_nokia_770_2006.tbz
Or, on any other *nix computer: bunzip2 -c pose_nokia_770_2006.tbz | tar xvf -

[vimcat]

There is a bzip deb available--I just did a search for it in the application manager to find it.

[BlueSpyder]

The POSE emulator accepts command line options. You can load third party applications with a command line such as this:

./pose -rom Palm_IIIc.rom -load_apps NeoCal.PRC

If you have more than one app to load, you can comma separate the app names after the -load_apps.

-BlueSpyder

[vimcat]

I can't seem to get past the palm screen. I'm able to load palmos40-en-m505.rom but it defaults to the generic skin. Then after it loads (I only see the screen with color palm startup screen and part of the app/input area) it freezes. NothIng works, so I end up rebooting. I downloaded everything to my n800 internal card then used bzip2, tar and unrar in xterm to decompress to /user/home. I also tried this rom: PalmIIIcOS40-en-color.rom and the first one multiple times.

[TA-t3]

@vimcat: It probably just loops. If you're logged in remotely you can use 'top' or 'ps -ef' to find the pid, and kill it. If you're not logged in, try pressing either the 'home' key or the escape key (I forgot which), it'll allow you to get back to the xterm window where you can enter ctrl C to abort it.

[lucky-luke]

Well, I extracted all files to a home dir, also the rom file, but when I type ./pose I only get a permission denied. I used chmod +x ./pose
The file pose is
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user root 3281932 Apr 5 05:46 pose
Should be root:root ?
I tried to use as root and as a normal user with the same luck

[TA-t3]

It shouldn't matter what the owner.group is. FYI my installed pose is also user.root, as yours.
Check that you didn't inadvertantly set your home directory non-writable or something (start xterm, enter ls -ld) because I think it's trying to write to a .poserc file or something.. but I thought that happened a good while after it started ok.
I can't see right away what the problem is. I have it installed in /usr/local/bin/ (with the PATH accordingly), but I don't see why it shouldn't execute out of /home/user/.
Or did you install it to a directory on a card? That wouldn't work, as those filesystems are mounted noexec.

[lucky-luke]

It doesn't work for me in /media/mm1/ , copied to /home and works.
Now, I'm not able to use any skin.
Also, there is anyway to share a dir between MMC and pose?, to use documents from my old palm...

[BlueSpyder]

It turns out that if one sets the "POSER_DIR" env variable, POSE can find skins just fine. In my case, a simple:

export POSER_DIR=/home/user/pose_nokia_2006

worked wonders

[unique311]

so what is the status of the port as of 5/21
I really want to use it, but was discourage when I only got 75% of the screen....

[luketoh]

yeah, it'll be really great if POSE for the N770/N800 can be completed. It'll help a great deal for apps use...

[flyinghigh]

Hi,

Does the POSE emulator have access to N800 resources - ie can it access bluetooth data for example from a GPS receiver

Pete

[ArnimS]

Thanks for testing. Your feedback is noted. I can't address the N800 display problems, as i have no N800.

Currently rotating screen, doublesizing and keyboard input are top on my list. Networking and filesharing after that.

[VRe]

You don't need to rotate! If you make custom skin without all the borders it fits just fine. My ugly hack has still a bit of unused space between the screen and writing area. Also there is now quite a lot of empty space on the right. One could use that for graffiti cheatsheet or for virtual keyboard pop-up button if writing graffitis would be too much for some.

Here is picture with the ugly skin without borders:
328
Here you can compare and see how high the virtual keyboard pops up:
329

Now binding right-click menu to menu-bar would make it half usable. And adding keyboard-popup for some of the pose dialogs would make it better.

BTW: pose is packaged is Debian, so you don't need to repackage it. just add "deb-src http://ftp.fi.debian.org/debian etch main contrib non-free" to /etc/apt/sources.list in scrachbox and run "apt-get -b source fluid pose". Only compilation issues are with fltk: it won't compile straight away, I think you need to modify builddeps first.

[unique311]

nice work....going to see what else is possible with this....rotating is quit impossible, well thats what the devs at the access forum told me.
but with this find of yours...maybe just maybe we can make pose usable on maemo....

[wirelessaddict]

OMG I cant believe I didnt see this before. This is awesome.

[unique311]

not sure if its all that awesome....the project dev dropped out of site....
the hacked the individual before me for skin mod doesn't work....
it would be a nice project..if we can get it to work nice with the n800 or 770

[unique311]

2 days, 2 nights is how long it took me to freaking figure this whole thing out....

First of, keyboard is definitely needed until this thing gets some sort of hildonizing done to it to add a drop down menu.
If you are like moi and cannot afford a bluetooth keyboard yet.
Synergy is the next best thing.
Its somewhere on maemo.org.

but I have a working PalmOS Emulator on my N800, for you guys who own a 770 just download the modified ROM&skins (http://www.divshare.com/download/1047796-45f) pack I up'ed, and that should work fine.
READ the readme files.

To get you started I'm providing all the Files needed, starting with the .debs

FLTK-1.1.7 (http://www.divshare.com/download/1048189-8a2) POSE depends on this package.
Download and install from Xterminal with the command dpkg -i <debpack>

PalmOS Emulator (http://www.divshare.com/download/1048042-1d6)
Download and install from Xterminal with the command dpkg -i <debpack>

ROMS&skins (http://www.divshare.com/download/1047796-45f)
In this pack you will find 2 folders.
The skins folder containing the m130 and the m505 modified skins.
The ROMS folder containing the m130 4.1 rom and the m505 4.0 rom.
Also README files in both folders.

Pictures of the skins of course.
m130 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/unique0nez/601062445/)
m505 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/unique0nez/601062459/)

Video
m130 skin at work.... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPF19gypbGo)

N800 users installing the .deb packs will provide and icon for POSE in the extras folder...and you life will be easy...

770 users start up pose with Pupniks compiled version of POSE from command line.

thats all I have.....be glad to answer questions.
As for feed back for features, wrong person to ask. Not good at all hildon or anything at that.


Edit:

The debs will install via the Application Manager now.

hardkeys are mapped....figure them out.......
The FULLSCREEN key is the most important, but we are not at fullscreen yet.
so right now its map to another important feature and thats right click.
VOLUME keys are for scrolling up and down.
ENTER is mapped to that center square key, I don't think I have to tell you how whats the keys around it are mapped to.
figure out the rest.


Eleminating the need for a keyboard is still not 100%.
on start up you will need to use a keyboard to right click which is the only time you will need it.

The links are all updated.

The skins are all update also, if you know how to use The GIMP, then I included some .xpf files.
Screw around with them, make your own skins for god sakes..


EDITED

[ArnimS]

Sorry i haven't been able to do anything with this. I'd like to thank Unique311 for the new double size skin -- looks great!

Since the handwriting recognition doesn't yet work, and afaict there's no easy way to pop-up the hildon virtual keyboard, i still think a rotated version is necessary to have space for a pose-skin virtual keyboard.

Am i wrong here? Another option might be running it in landscape mode and placing alphanumeric keys on either side of the main POSE screen. It wouldn't be querty, but we'd save the hassle of hacking the display routines.

* What changes did you make to POSE sourcecode, if any?
* Have you been able to load/save files within POSE yet?
* Please upload package source so I can compile a N770 .deb

cheers

[unique311]

Sorry i haven't been able to do anything with this. I'd like to thank Unique311 for the new double size skin -- looks great!

Since the handwriting recognition doesn't yet work, and afaict there's no easy way to pop-up the hildon virtual keyboard, i still think a rotated version is necessary to have space for a pose-skin virtual keyboard.

Am i wrong here? Another option might be running it in landscape mode and placing alphanumeric keys on either side of the main POSE screen. It wouldn't be querty, but we'd save the hassle of hacking the display routines.

* What changes did you make to POSE sourcecode, if any?
* Have you been able to load/save files within POSE yet?
* Please upload package source so I can compile a N770 .deb

cheers

hmmm, hildon pop-up keyboard for pose....out of my league.
A pose skin with a virtual keyboard not sure that would work for the m130 or m505.
you would have to get roms for (treo90, treo270, treo k180), that have a keyboard. Gave the ROMs for those devices a try and they do not work on the Emulator3.5. Further research shows that those roms work on the 3.0 emulator. Koders.com have a version of the source code, but it looks like every single file has to be download individually.
Could definitely split that keyboard in half, and make a skin that would definitely work.
PDAEXPERT (http://www.pdaexpert.net/conteudo/downloads/palm-os/)
breaks down which emulator is using which roms and skins.
the clie is compatible 3.2
handspring is compatible with 3.0
Handera is compatible with 3.1
the tungsten W is compatible with 3.0
not sure if thats the math...but this is what Im getting from downloading the different emulators and roms....

now for your questions.
* What changes did you make to POSE sourcecode, if any?
made changes to one file and that file is ->>Emwindow<-- located in the sharedsrc folder.
that modification was to bound the hardware keys to the skins buttons, Not sure if the next version release should include a skin with hardkeys.

* Have you been able to load/save files within POSE yet?
Yes, memopad and notes(think its done using the apps DataBase). Not sure this is quite what you mean.
also session wise. you can can save a snapshot of your current pose activities. advise people to save their sessions after installing applications.
you can do this manually or have it done automatically.
Automatically= right click>settings>preferences> select Always save settings.

* Please upload package source so I can compile a N770 .deb
You're on IRC ask me for the file.....or I can easily paste the line of code for you of the change I did to Emwindow.

Using FLTK 1.1.7 source from debian.
also using pose 3.5 source from debian.
everything was already patched, and good to go.

[glasseur]

Hello folks,

This might be a nice project but as there is no documentation and
no readme files in the Rom&Skin package it's hard to run and then
to get an opinion.

So it will be nice if someone, who says it's working fine for me is able
to say how to run the thing afer installing it.

Thanks in advance for who will render this thread more usefull than to
have to dig google.

Regards

[mysticv6]

Has anyone tried the Slingplayer Beta for Palm OS under POSE? The requirements state you need a Treo 700p or 755p, which I believe run too new of a Palm OS, but it would be a great solution to using a Slingbox with a 770...

[vegasvento]

Using Xkbd and Pose, is there a button on the virtual keyboard that would simulate the right mouse click needed to open the drop menu?

[jibanes]

Thsi application is fantastic, I can now run my favorite Palm applications, which, I forgot to mention crash under Garnet VM, but work fine under pose (abeit slowly). What can be done to speed-up pose, is there any combination of palm device/skin/preferences that would make it work a little faster, like for instance lowering the refresh rate or anything of the like?

[unique311]

I did the minor things to pose to get it going.
Alot of the harder stuff needed are out of my league.
such as optimization, and having the hildon keyboard work.
I have the source code available if someone wants to continue with it.