*** This use of the Dell Axim is not supported by Dell ***

Thanks to the great work of Martin Demin over at handhelds.org, it is now possible to run Linux on the Axim. It currently only supports load from RAM (not ROM) which means you boot it from Windows, but it's a start. Specifically, if you follow these instructions made available by Steve Johnson it's pretty easy. Though, beware that it currently kernel panics after about 15 minutes, and when you do the hard reset, it boots back into Windows at factory default settings (meaning, you lose any files you might have stored on it).

Touchscreen, sound, lcd, serial port, buttons and charging all currently function. Much work still remains on things like the power button, screen rotation support, battery indicator, and loading it into the actual flash ROM, but this really is a great start. Check out the picture below...running a 2.4.19 based kernel on the Familiar Linux distribution.

I've included all this information on my linux page so that these links are readily available outside of this blog entry.

By Gary at 01:32 PM in Linux | Comments (4)  

I think the panic after 15 minutes is caused by the system trying to suspend itself. Suspend doesn't work yet. I avoided this by setting all the power saving timeouts as high as they would go.

Posted by: Steve Johnson at June 28, 2003 06:35 AM

well, since i didnt had any CF cards i quickly hacked the linuxloader and got it to boot, but i havnt had the time
to hack at it to boot up completely...
so its missing its root....is someone else working on that?

Posted by: Fabian Olesen at July 5, 2003 08:59 AM

Any news???

Posted by: itanczos at November 24, 2003 03:41 PM

Hello Gary!
I write you because when i try to load linux on my axim, only appears "Hello world!", and i can not load linux. Could you tell me what is happening?
P.S. Thank you for your work to linux community!!

Posted by: Benjamin Amezcua at March 18, 2004 07:51 PM