Locally developed personal digital assistants with embedded Linux operating systems are expected to hit the Hong Kong market by the end of this year.
According to Moon Yiu-sang, a professor at the department of computer science and engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, local hardware developers are working to integrate the embedded system into small devices such as mobile phones and PDAs.
'It was always the most difficult task for companies to install the embedded Linux OS to handheld devices. But now we have solved the problems and we are able to put embedded Chinese system on small handhelds like Compaq's iPaq,' Mr Moon said.
The University has been working with the Hong Kong Productivity Council on developing a Chinese-language embedded Linux system with a one-off grant of about HK$2 million which it received in 2000 from the Innovation and Technology Fund.
Linux was originally developed as an operating system for personal computers. However, there has been little development work in producing a Chinese version for handheld devices.
Mr Moon said the University used Qt, a graphical user-interface development kit from Norwegian software firm Trolltech. Qt is an extensible C++ framework which has been used to develop many of the most popular Linux applications.