1. Introduction

As an electronic engineer, I always enjoyed minimalistic systems. They always provide a kind of challenge to your accepted rules, as your dogmas tend to collapse when facing the crude reality. On minimal systems, this phenomenon tends to happen even quicker than on complex ones. One other interesting feature of this minimalistic approach is that it tends to keep things humanly manageable, which is comfortable, as today's computer science requires you to master a broad set of concepts, tools and computer languages...

Back in 1980, my first computer was a Goupil 2, quickly followed by an Apple II+, where I started programming. Having undergone dozens of computers, computer languages, and proprietary operating systems, I discovered Linux in 1994, when my company at that time (Lectra Systèmes), decided to take a Unix-like operating system on a PC platform as its base for application development. After careful evaluation and pushed by Pierre Ficheux and Daniel Roche, Linux was preferred to other commercial products, first because of its good performance but also because of its price. At that time, emails were not on everybody's computer, and the computer community was just emerging from the universities. We thus followed the growth of Free Software, and as an engineer, I found working like that was fun.

Since then, I tried to keep on working with GNU/Linux as much as possible, although I should not be considered as a Free Software activist. I am just pragmatic, and I still use commercial software whenever I don't find the corresponding free tools. I know, I should write my own, but sometimes, I am just too lazy, or focused on the more important goal that required this tool. I don't feel too guilty for that, as I try to participate to the Free Software movement whenever I can.

I got a first Uniden® PDA, but I should say that it belongs now to one of my brothers, since I was very disappointed by the fact that there was no (at least documented) way to change the software on it, or even to write programs for it without having to learn tons of things about DLL's major enhancement (I already played with shared libraries on my Amiga 500 in 1987...), and the virtues of Hungarian notation (I still find this is one of the silliest things ever invented, especially since polymorphisms in Object Oriented Programming).

I was a kind of shocked when I first saw my actual boss, Jean-Marc Lange, play with its iPAQ PDA. But what really stunt me is when I discovered by browsing on the Web that some crazy persons did it. Yes, thanks to what was formerly named Compaq® (now Hewlett Packard®), and a lot of good-willed persons, it was possible to put Free Software on this machine.

I took this as a challenge, and I think that writing this document on converting an iPAQ to GNU/Linux is my best effort to help the Free Software Community.

This document was also a good exercise to practice DocBook. If you read these lines, it means that I was able to master it!