Can PalmOS apps applications be ported to run on Openmoko?
Making legacy apps written for the “Garnet” OS (née “Palm OS”) run on Linux is decidedly non-trivial. PalmOS apps are in general very hard to simply ‘port’. Particularly well-designed programs may make it possible. The ACCESS Linux Platform will include Garnet on Host (GHost), a PalmOS emulator that will support M68000 (68k) and ARM PalmOS applications. This part (GarnetVM and the .prc loader) will however be closed-source and likely under a restrictive license (fact confirmed by ACCESS Co. employees), making it rather unusable. In addition GarnetVM depends on Hiker and other packages. It is possible that POSE, an emulator that simulates a Palm device on a Linux host could be used to allow 68k based applications to run. This emulator has been around a long time; one expects that it will also run on Openmoko, but this has to be considered a short-term bandaid rather than a long-term solution. Hopefully emulation will be necessary only for M68000 code (pre-PalmOS 5) while native ARM prog
