Release Notice

25th June 2001

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is with the greatest of pleasure that we today proclaim the intimate project http://intimate.handhelds.org ready for beta release and general consumption by developers and interested parties. This release is named version _a1 (not alpha 1)

The intimate project is a fully blown debian environment for the Compaq iPAQ for the lucky few with enough storage to run it. The current base requirement after installation is approximately 140MB, although this can be reduced to as little as 64MB ith a different selection of packages. The intimate project aims to bridge the gap between the debian arm distribution and the familiar distribution to provide a fully working debian based system for the iPAQ, giving a full development environment for native application development for Familiar.

*** Using the blkmtd driver that was just released, you can fit 140MB of data on a 96MB CF ***
*** It takes two minutes to mount a card, and the install procedure hasn't been updated yet ***
*** but we've got 140Mb of intimate on a 96MB CF card with about 96MB of free space :) ***

The environment is configured so that it will co-exist with the Familiar environment. A modified /linuxrc attempts to detect the presence of a suitable alternate boot device at startup. If no alternatives are available, then the familiar distribution is booted from flash as normal.

The default installation contains all the tools and utilities for kernel compilation natively on the iPAQ, additional tools can be installed using a simple 'apt-get install <packagename>' and there's the whole of the Debian unstable feed to choose from, plus a range of iPAQ specific.debs available from the intimate .deb repositary. (apt-cache stats currently reports 6509
available packages, most of which work reasonably by default, 55 of these are ipaq specific packages in the intimate repositary. Of those 55, three were built in bed, and one on the train) The intimate distribution let's you sit code, compile and test wherever you are.

Of course, you can do a whole lot more than just compile code. There's the obligatory MP3 players, games (lxdoom, tetris etc), web browsers, email apps, word processors... you name it.. you've got the whole of debian unstable to use remember. Sure, not everything's going to work, but the large majority seems just fine if you've got a bit of swap. Check the screenshots to see some of the stuff that's working already. http://intimate.handhelds.org/screens.html

So please, if you're lucky enough to have the space to use, then please, give it a try.
We'd love to know what you think...(as long as it's good :-)

Just one last thing...

We would like to express our extreme thanks and gratitude to CRL for the whole iPAQ thing,
but especially for hosting the intimate project on handhelds.org . Thank you very very much CRL!

Tangent & Jacques