Your phone may not be what you think it is. For instance, my phone was an HP iPaq hw6515 mobile messenger handheld. After searching for information about how to put Linux on my phone I found out that the real name of my device was HTC Beetles.

HTC is a corporation that designs many different mobile phones today. They are especially known for their smart phone devices. Other companies like Motorola, HP, and AT&T use HTC to design their phones and label them with different words. Chances are if you have a smart phone it was originally designed by HTC.

HTC models are not the only devices that may have alternate names. The Sharp Zaurus, one of the original devices to have Linux ported to it, has several different names like collie and poodle.

One of the steps you need to take is to find out if your device is known in the embedded Linux community by another name. One especially useful resource is to use http://www.pdadb.net. They have an enormous listing of PDAs and smart phones on the market along with special information about them. One of the pieces of information they include is alternate names, usually just in parenthesis for the device name. Another resource is http://wiki.xda-developers.com/. This is the XDA Developer's Wiki. On the front page they show images of many popular phones along with their names. You can also use the search box on this page to search for more information about your device.

Once you have discovered your device's real identity it is time to search and see if someone has already started the process of porting Linux to your specific device. The sad news is that if your device is fairly new then not much has been done to port Linux to your device. If your device happens to be more than a couple years old you will have a better chance that it is supported by the current Linux kernel.

The first step would be to have a look at pre-built images for your device. The Angstrom distribution is the most active distribution currently. They have images already compiled and ready for download here: http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/releases/2007.12/images/. These images are stable and should be installed without any problems. There are more devices that images have been built for here: http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/unstable/. These are unstable images and in some cases may not even be complete or tested in any way.

Familiar is an older distribution with support for many iPaq devices: http://familiar.handhelds.org/releases/v0.8.4/install/download.html.

The OpenZaurus project is another older distribution and has mostly been moved over to Angstrom but not completely. It has great support for almost all the Sharp Zaurus models (http://www.openzaurus.org/wordpress/).