PumpkinOS: A Modern Reimplementation of PalmOS for Today’s Platforms
In a world where the personal digital assistant (PDA) has become yet another retro computing system, it’s always nice when experiencing the software for such platforms can be done in a way that does not involve hunting down original hardware of questionable functionality. Here PumpkinOS is a PalmOS-compatible project by [migueletto] which runs as a regular application on modern systems and allows for original PalmOS applications for the Motorola 68k to run on x86 and ARM host systems.
On start-up the Launcher shows up first, just like with PalmOS, from which the four standard PalmOS applications (AddressBook, MemoPad, ToDoList and DateBook) can be launched. Due to endianness issues (m68k being Big Endian), files created by these applications cannot be shared between PumpkinOS and PalmOS, and as noted on the GitHub page, it’s still a far from finished project. That said, it appears to be able to run quite a few original PalmOS applications from sites like PalmDB, and compatibility should get better over time.
The author maintains a development blog as well, for those who are interested in the more in-depth details of this project.
An update
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PumpkinOS: A FOSS PalmOS-compatible runtime environment
PumpkinOS is not exactly a FOSS re-implementation of PalmOS, but it's something in that general direction. In some ways it's akin to the recreated Amiga OS AROS – a clean Free Software recreation of the old proprietary environment, without using any original code, that allows legacy apps to run. It's not a bare-metal OS, it runs on top of Windows or Linux, and provides a PalmOS-compatible environment in which original apps can run.
One impressive demo has it running on a cut-down Linux kernel on a Raspberry Pi with a touchscreen. There are also other projects afoot to bring PalmOS to more modern kit that will fit in your pocket, which we will return to in a moment.