[Haskell-cafe] Hugs for Zaurus

[John Goerzen]

On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 01:52:58PM -0800, Fritz Ruehr wrote:
> I'm curious if you know what the requirements (memory, model, etc.) for 
> running Hugs on a Zaurus might be: I am not normally a PDA sort of 
> person, but a quick search indicates that Zauruses (Zauri?) are 
> available (used) for around US $30-50 (e.g., 2MB ZR 5800 through 64 MB 
> SL-5500). I'm guessing the 2MB model wouldn't work, but even at the 
> higher prices the temptation would be great.

I can give you some idea, at least.  When started from scratch, hugs
consumes about 4MB RAM on my system.

for those of you not familiar with the Zaurus, it is a PDA from Sharp
that runs a version of the Linux kernel and the Qt-derived Qtopia
environment from the factory.  There arealso numerous projects that have
developed alternative Zaurus ROMs, such as OpenZaurus.  

In addition to the Zaurus models you mentioned, there is also the
640x480 cxx0 series (c760, c860, c700, c750/ etc).  These models were
only sold in Japan, but are widely available in the rest of the world
through ebay and sites like dynamism.com and conics.net..  I have a c760
and it has 128MB RAM IIRC.

Most Zaurii can take SD and CF cards.  Debian has been ported to the
Zaurus also, and can run from a memory card.  nhc98 works in such a
setting.  Of course, hugs already works that way.  My effort simply
makes it work outside a debian chroot.  My understanding is that ghc is
currently broken on arm, but if/when that is fixed, you could actually
run ghc itself on the zaurus in Debian.  Thouhg it sometimes uses
almost 1GB of RAM -- that won't do :-)

The OpenEmbedded folks have a cross-compilation system built up, and
packages of about 1200 well-known unix programs that build in that
environment .  This is how OpenZaurus itself gets bilt.A  They do have a
hugs package, but it was broken due to some incompatibilities with
cross-compiling.

Hope this helps.  Feel free to ask if you have any other questions.