HP Jornada 720 (2000)

I always wanted to play around a bit with a Windows CE device. The Jornada 720 was released in 2000. It featured 32 MB of RAM, a Compact Flash slot, a PC card slot, a Smart card slot, 56K Modem, 640x240 16-bit display, a 206 MHz StrongARM CPU, and has 9 hours of battery life. It ran under the Windows CE 3.0 based HPC2000.

The Jornada was a line of PDAs manufactured by Hewlett-Packard, includin Palm-Size PCs, Handheld PCs, and Pocket PCs. The first model was the 820, released in 1998, and the last was the 928 model in 2002 when Compaq and HP merged. The Jornada line was then succeeded by the more popular iPAQ model PDAs.

The Jornada 720 provided automatic synchronization of PIM (personal information manager) data with the user’s PC. It came with communications capabilities, including the ability to send and receive faxes, a voice-recorder feature with e-mail capabilities for sending multimedia messages, dial-up e-mail and graphical web browsing. It also incorporated a voice-recorder decoding system designed by HP.

The companion cradle/dock had a stylus holder, USB connectivity and also served as a battery charger.

I could write a bit more about the features, but Shiunbird did a great job in presenting the device all over, so just check his video

All in all, the 720 was a really nice device when launched, was pretty popular, despise it’s price tag of about $1000 when released, and now it’s seen as a pretty nice toy. While useless in the day-to-day activity, I’m pretty sure it can perform honourably some less intense calculations. Which brings me to the second half of this article …

JLime - Jornada Linux

Jlime is an Linux distribution for the HP Jornada, NEC Mobilepro 900c, Psion Mobilepro and Qi-Hardware Ben Nanonote embedded devices. Jlime aims to provide an actively maintained distribution which can be used to transform your embedded device into either an enhanced PDA or a mini-laptop. As with all Linux code, JLime is open source and free to use.

JLime used to stand for “Jornada Linux Mobility Edition”. It featured many things, and it was a reliable Linux distribution, perfect for hobby developers. You can see some screenshots below taken from the hpcfactor.com repository. There were some game screenshots as well, but the archive.org system did not cache them at full size.

Unfortunately, the JLime project was discontinued by 2016, but thankfully, because the devices were pretty popular and many users fiddled a lot with them, many of files survived. A few repositories are still available online:

A quick presentation of JLime is done by Nathan Campos in a short, but very good video

Acetolyne Projects published an article about Alternative OS’s for the HP Jornada 720. The article is very well documented, including terminal commands, and I recommend you give it a read, as it goes deep down the rabbit hole explaining on how JLime is installed and configured. The article should have had a debian section too, but it seems it was scrapped. Some files can still be downloaded from the Acetolyne downloads sections. I will also add them to the downloads section in a zip file.

Some extra links with some information can be found on archive.org, but they are unreliable

I managed to grab the wallpapers of the project, my three favorites are below, but you can get the full archive in the Downloads section.