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XcopilotXcopilot is a Palm Pilot emulator that runs under Unix/X11. It offers emulation of the timer, serial ports, touch pad and LCD display along with Motorola 68000 emulation (m68k), specifically the Dragonball derivative upon which early Pilots were based. Xcopilot was originally developed as a Windows program however the port fell into disuse while the Unix/X11 port went on to become widely used. Written in the 1990s Xcopilot was aimed at developers of applications on the Palm OS platform, freeing them from the drudgery of interfacing to the real hardware during the devlopment process. Xcopilot found a new role in the 2000s with the development of uCLinux, a version of Linux meant for very low-end microprocessors without an MMU . Today Xcopilot is no longer maintained but is still useful for trying out uClinux. With the addition of a virtual ethernet Xcopilot would probably become more popular again, because the simulated hardware would then look very like many modern firewall and VPN devices based on Motorola processors. Networking is only available over PPP on the simulated serial port. At linux.conf.au 2004 a LiveCD was produced to support the talks, one of which was on uCLinux. The screenshot shows Xcopilot used on this CD to run a webserver explaining how to use the CD. Xcopilot on modern desktop-class hardware runs faster than the real Palm hardware ever did. In the image the Linux kernel is reporting the CPU running at 43MHz, but the real Palm hardware ran at a maximum of 20MHz. Obtaining Xcopilot There does not seem to be any current Xcopilot homepage. The most up to date source for using Xcopilot with uClinux is the version in CVS on cvs.uclinux.org. cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.uclinux.org:/var/cvs login Just press enter at the password prompt, and then run: cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.uclinux.org:/var/cvs checkout xcopilot Otherise a reasonably recent version can be downloaded from http://www.uclinux.org/pub/uClinux/utilities/xcopilot-0.6.6-uc0.tar.gz External links - Tutorial a tutorial on getting uClinux working with Xcopilot.
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