Twenty years ago I bought Sharp Zaurus SL -5500 Linux PDA . With StrongARM SA1110 inside. And I had no idea how it will end… At first it w

Twenty years of my work with Arm architecture – Marcin Juszkiewicz

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2024-02-13 03:30:07

Twenty years ago I bought Sharp Zaurus SL -5500 Linux PDA . With StrongARM SA1110 inside. And I had no idea how it will end…

At first it was a hobby. Finding what I can do with it (compared to previous devices running PalmOS) was fun. SharpROM, OpenZaurus 3.2, OpenZaurus 3.3-pre1 etc. New apps, taskbar plugins…

Then I wanted to build something. Found an OpenZaurus toolchain, tried it and went for help. And got “forget this toolchain, we have a new toy: OpenEmbedded”.

Took me some time to get familiar with that (lot of n00b questions asked). Then many attempts to get a bootable image. Turned out that my image was one of first properly booting on a SL -5500 device. So I got write access to OpenEmbedded with “now you can merge all of it” message.

I spent three years working on OpenZaurus distribution. In my free time. Started as a user, went through being developer and ended as a release manager. Through those years I moved from my SL -5500 to the c760 (donated by user). Had several other Zaurus models on my desk in meantime.