*** 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)