Linux Palm Developer's Quick Start Guide

PalmOS © Emulator

Building the emulator for linux was a another step I didn't want to deal with yet. Fear not. It's Weller with 2 L's. I will do it soon, and I'll rewrite this doc to reflect that portion. For now I just got the windows prebuilt emulator and skins. Pretty straight forward. You install a palm app that comes with the package to your handheld. This allows you to download the PalmOS © image from the palm's rom. You have to pay money and sign an NDA (double whammy) to get other rom images/versions. Anybody got an archive ;) Do the deed as in the readmes and Blamh your palm on your desktop. Plus you can hotsync over the network with the regular hotsync manager and the emulator.

PRC Tools

GNU Tools

3. Setting up, building and installing the tools

  export MYPALMDIR=/root/palm
  export MYARCHIVEDIR=$MYPALMDIR/archive
  export PATH=/usr/local/palm/bin:$PATH
  mkdir /usr/local/palmdev
  mkdir /usr/local/palm
  cd $MYPALMDIR
  tar -xzf $MYARCHIVEDIR/sdk35.tar.gz
  mv Palm\ OS \ 3.5\ Support/ /usr/local/palmdev/sdkpalmos-3.5
  cd /usr/local/palmdev/sdkpalmos-3.5
  mv Incs include
  cd $MYPALMDIR
  mkdir src
  cd src
  tar -xzf $MYARCHIVEDIR/binutils-2.9.1.tar.gz
  tar -xzf $MYARCHIVEDIR/gcc-2.95.2.tar.gz
  tar -xzf $MYARCHIVEDIR/gdb-4.18.tar.gz
  tar -xzf $MYARCHIVEDIR/prc-tools-2.0.tar.gz
  cat prc-tools-2.0/{binutils-2.9.1,gcc-2.95.2,gdb-4.18}.palmos.diff | patch -p0
  cd prc-tools-2.0/
  ln -s ../binutils-2.9.1 binutils
  ln -s ../gcc-2.95.2 gcc
  ln -s ../gdb-4.18 gdb
  cd ..
  mkdir build
  cd build
  mkdir empty
  ../prc-tools-2.0/configure \
    --target=m68k-palmos; \
    --enable-languages=c,c++  \
    --with-headers=`pwd`/empty  \
    --sharedstatedir=/usr/local/palmdev \
    --prefix=/usr/local/palm --with-build-sdk=3.5 \
    --exec-prefix=/usr/local/palm;
  make all-install

Assuming all goes as expected. You'll have the SDK stuff in /usr/local/palmdev and then platform specific tools (m68k-palmos-gcc,m68k-palmos-c++,m68k-palmos-ranlib, etc.) in /usr/local/palm. Now put /usr/local/palm/bin in your permanent path (edit .bashrc,.cshrc, profile etc.).

4. A Hello World Program

Now you can compile a hello proggie.

I had to hack up all the demos from the HOWTOs after reading the SDK header files. The header names, primitive types, and compiler tool's names are incorrect for version 3.5 of the PalmOS © SDK in the HOWTO samples. Plus, it appears that the Examples that come with the SDK all have zero length resource files (e.g. SampleCalculator.rsrc). I compiled the packages, but they crashed on the emulator.

Save the below snippet in a text file called hello.c .

#include <PalmOS.h>

// ---------------------------------------------------------------------
// PilotMain is called by the startup code and implements a simple event
// handling loop.
// ---------------------------------------------------------------------
UInt32 PilotMain( UInt16 cmd, void *cmdPBP, UInt16 launchFlags )
{
    EventType event;


    if (cmd == sysAppLaunchCmdNormalLaunch) {

        //  Display a string.
        WinDrawChars( "Hello, world!", 13, 55, 60 );

        //  Main event loop:
        do {
            //  Doze until an event arrives.
            EvtGetEvent( &event, evtWaitForever );

            //  System gets first chance to handle the event.
            SysHandleEvent( &event );

            //  Normally, we would do other event processing here.

        // Return from PilotMain when an appStopEvent is received.
        } while (event.eType != appStopEvent);
    }
    return;
}

You can compile it like this. Did you fix your PATH to have /usr/local/palm/bin ?

  m68k-palmos-gcc hello.c -o hello
  m68k-palmos-obj-res hello
  build-prc hello.prc "Hello, World" WRLD *.hello.grc

Blamho! Now you'll have a hello.prc that you can put in the emulator (works!) or in your palm (WORKS!).

5. Screen Shots

Here's some pics and screen shots of the emulator (running under windows) running hello.prc (compiled under linux). You'll note the name of the app is what was specified on the build-prc command line. I also tested the hello.prc file on my PalmIIIe. It Works!

6. References

7. Downloads

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