iPAQ running X and Kaffe

The basic distribution from handhelds contains a tiny X-server (integrated in the xfree 4.0 software, see build X in the handhelds HOWTO section on information on how to compile it). The functionality of X and the many applications that use X are interesting enough when you intend to play with the installation (compared to direct use of the framebuffer). Since I need Java (I prefer Ruby now) for my JVPC project), I wanted kaffe to run under X. So here it goes, chronologically:
January 2001:
Managed to compile and run Kaffe, after finding and solving some bad bugs. I noticed that the 16 bits Unicode strings were displayed displaced, several other GUI things do not display properly and compressed jarfiles are not read. Turns out this is caused by a buggy libfloat.

20 January 2001:
I fixed the bug in X that caused the strings in awt to be displaced. A fixed Xlib was provided on this site, but the fix is incorporated in XFree, so you just need to upgrade your familiar distro.

21 January 2001:
I tried to recompiled kaffe from cvs (tag pocketlinux-v1), but ran into too many of the same errors that were in my previous version. My (other) patch apparently had not been applied, 'coz that particular bug was in there, still.

20 January 2002:
One year later :)
Need to get JVPC running again, but I detected libfloat.so is as buggy as possible. Dividing by doubles is a mess. So I need to recompile kaffe for kernel-emulated floating point. I thought to have updated some things from CVS, but I didn't...

25 January 2002:
Based on the need of some colleagues of Philips Displays, David Lia and built Kaffe for CerfBoard with framebuffer. The second try came from current CVS, which worked surprisingly well, even though there are many tweaks needed and some stupid omissions and wrong-orders in the scripts from pocketlinux.

Anyway, this is a fresh version, which turns out to be faster and I think less memory-consuming. It uses static libraries for kaffe-only stuff (that's smart, actually) and I made an ipkg for it, get it from my feed. Should work with libungif, libpng, libjpeg and libtiff.

And here is the script that performs all the miracles. You'll need to get jikes, the arm toolchain and libz, perhaps libungif, libjpeg, libtiff and libpng from the skiffs first, by yourself (hey, there should be some tasks left for you, so I left the tasks that are most useful elsewhere :)



Kero