But can your calculator run Linux?

Published: 01-08-2026 20:08 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article

One of my all time favorite calculators is the HP 16C . It is an RPN calculator aimed at computer programmers with support for hex, binary, octal and decimal and all sorts of useful operations like bit shifting, masking and rotations. I don't own one myself, I have a Swiss Micro's DM16L , a high quality modern day remake with improvements like a 2 line display. There is a limited run collectors edition of the HP 16C coming soon though. But none of those calculators run Linux.

Screenshot of the console and partial fbv image viewer

Below are at least a thousand words covering the HP Prime G2 and other graphical calculators capable of running Linux. You can skip that if you just want to read about my updated Linux port for the Prime G2.

The HP Prime is a graphing calculator on the market since 2013, with a hardware revision in 2018 (the G2 model). It has a touch screen and as far as I can find, most people are happy with it and find it a very capable and fast calculator. Here are some pictures of the opened up calculator and here is a website with some more downloads.

I'm not really interested in the calculator part. For most calculations I do for my day job, embedded programming, the HP-16C is a better fit. I was interested in this device because I found posts online suggesting it could run Linux and even a Windows 10 port.

I do have a history running Linux on older HP devices and I do like to have full privilege on all devices I own. Back then I wrote:

I have a rule that I try to adhere to for devices I own. They must allow a means of root or administrative actions. The Nintendo Switch I got second hand is old enough to be jailbroken. The two Apple devices I own (a first gen iPad Air and first-gen iPhone SE) have vulnerabilities that give me root access. All Android phones I owned I've specifically bought because the bootloader can be unlocked. Once I buy a device, it is mine and I decide what to do with it. Not the manufacturer. Otherwise it is e-waste the moment it leaves the factory.

Being able to develop software on a device is almost a must have as well for me. Missing functionality, otherwise known as stuff the manufacturer does not make (enough) money on, can be programmed back in as long as you can develop on a device and are willing to put in enough time and/or money.

Now with a calculator that isn't a huge issue since I don't see them as general purpose computing devices. Although Texas Instruments did later on removed and restricted features that their device shipped with initially, namely running assembly code on your calculator and Numworks also locked down their calculators . That all has to do with cheating and exam mode, so I do understand that part. If your device is not allowed on official exams / tests, it won't be used or sell well. On the HP Prime there never was assembly (only a custom basic like language called PPL) so they can't take that away. There is a quote from an HP employee stating :

"It is not locked down and is just used for verification at this time. Note however, we DO have the ability to fully encrypt and lock the system to hell as that is part of the new chip. We DO have that tested and working. We WILL turn it on if needed. It IS a corporate security mandate (after things like firmware being loaded into mice/keyboard or printers to hack networks came to light) that we fought to get an exemption for. Nobody dick around with exam mode. "

The Prime G2 is comically overpowered for a calculator if you ask me. It has an i.MX 6 Ultralite ARM Cortex A7 CPU, 256 MB DDR3 RAM and 512 MB of internal storage. I mean come on! It's closer to a small embedded Linux machine with a calculator keyboard attached than to a traditional calculator.

The G1, the previous hardware revision already had a 400MHz ARM CPU with 32MB ram, but the G2 is like an Android phone of a few years back.

The coffee machine hardware I work on at my day job has an i.MX6 module with comparable specifications. And that runs dedicated C++ and Qt applications on top of Yocto. The HP Prime G2 runs on FreeRTOS and the G1 runs on a custom RTOS named Besta OS .

I'm still shocked by the specifications, for a calculator! In daily usage it is very responsive and compared to other calculators, calculations are way faster, graphing is faster and via the touchscreen you can zoom/scale graphs, which is also almost instant. So they do put those specs to good use at least.

Let's check what their competitors have regarding specifications and possible Linux support. I've tried to find specifications of a few models available here in The Netherlands.

The TI 84+ CE has an 48 MHz eZ80 . No linux there.

The Numworks Graphing Calculator N0110 has a 216 MHz ARM Cortex-M7 CPU, 8 MB storage and 256 KB of SRAM. I still find 216 MHz to be way more megahertz than you'll probably need for a calculator, but who am I to judge. The later N0120 model even has a ridiculous 550 MHz ARM Cortex-M7, but a more reasonable 564KB of RAM. Then we're talking microcontroller levels of RAM. No linux here, but the OS is open source . There are even a few forks, but it seems that later firmware versions are locked down. Sad for enthousiasts, but probably it has something to do with cheating and exam mode.

The Casio FX-CG50 doesn't list cpu specifications but this post says 118 MHz and this post says the type, a custom Renesas SH7305 CPU, 8 MB of RAM and 32 MB of ROM. No linux there either. Although, maybe this guy can make it work.

The only other calculator I found with a linux port is the TI Nspire CX (II) (CAS). Here is an article on running Arch Linux on it and here is more info. The CX-II has a 396MHz ARM CPU with 64MB RAM and 128MB of flash storage. Not as much as the HP Prime, but still Linux capable.

My favourite calculator, the HP-16C, is a different story. This is not a competitor because it has no graphing features and its not exactly modern. The NUT CPU detailed description (A-1LF5-9002-1 - 7/14/81) states 200 to 230KHz for the 11C/12C and 340 to 380KHz for the 41C . There is a definition in the Nonpareii emulator stating 215 kHz, a post here by Nelson M. Sicuro from 2003 suggesting about 230 kHz and this page , stating 220 kHz. And 203 bytes of storage for programs. No Linux there sadly.

I don't have a big calculator collection nor am I an expert on calculators. I used them in high school and further in my education whenever math was involved. I stil have a TI-83 somewhere from those days. And a HP 11C, the non programmer, regular version of the HP 16C. I like that the 11C is RPN. For math, that just clicks better in my head.

For the G2 there is an old unsupported port with a 4.14 kernel. The linked linux repo no longer has the correct branch, buildroot failed, the devicetree file was messed up and the provided download doesn't show a console login, so I couldn't really use it. But it provided enough info to get started. I've updated the port for my HP Prime G2, with some enhancements:

After reconstructing the repo's using software heritage I was able to get a build up and running. I only tried running this in RAM, not wanting to flash the NAND and potentially loose the original calculator software.

The keyboard in Linux was only sending the orange marked letters, no dashes, underscores, numbers or a pipe character. At first I made an alternative keymap which loadkeys configured at boot. However, that didn't work in X11, so I just patched up the kernels keyboard driver ( imx_keypad.c ) to send the correct keys. The patch intercepts keycodes and if the ALT key is pressed it sends a different keycode. See input-event-codes.h for the mapping.

Using the Alpha key (ALT) you can enter numbers and some other special characters. Pressing the ALT key together with e.g. COS or TAN failed to send a keycode. I didn't look into that further, just used other keys. It might have to do with the keyboard matrix .

The original build's uuu scripts could boot Linux in RAM, but only a 15MB max build. By changing offsets in the kernel configuration, uuu script and u-boot you can now run an image up to 130 MB from RAM.

The original port did not boot up to a login screen but that was just a case of configuring getty in the init scripts.

The original build and a few articles in Russian ( here , here and here ) had a working touchscreen using a Goodix kernel driver, but in my build that did not work. It claimed to be on i2c bus 1 address 0x14 but i2cdetect showed no such address. It did show a mystery device at 0x26 , which while poking around showed a data structure changing while touches were sent.

After much fiddling and looking at raw i2c messages I found out that it looked comparable to an Illitek ILI211X device. Newer kernels have a driver and the ILI211X_DATA_SIZE matches my observations for a 43 byte data packet on i2c, a 0x5a start byte and the 0x26 address matched with another imx6 devicetree with that driver .

The HP recovery screen showed the touchscreen fw version as ilitek-03 which also was a hint. This old kernel has no driver for that model, only for older ones with a different protocol. I coded up a kernel driver based on the newer kernel driver, but stripped out all non-essentials, for example multitouch and finger pressure. I also made a calibration tool fbtouch_test since my screen had some oddities in the bottom right corner. Later I found a french forum post that stated that HP switched screens due to the Goodix ones not being in production anymore.

During debugging I found that modprobing the kernel module for usb serial support locked up the entire device. I changed that from a loadable kernel module to compiled in the kernel, which gave no crash anymore. I can now connect via serial to my calculator.

With touch support working I could also include X11 and a few programs. Once you're logged in on the console, type startx and twm will start together with xeyes , xclock and xcalc . Mouse and keyboard inputs work. Have fun running xcalc on your calculator. A long press is interpreted as a right click.

For fun I added tcc , the tiny c compiler . Because what good is a calculator if you can't compile your own code on it? There is a small sample hello.c file in /root which you can compile ( tcc hello.c -o hello ) and run ( ./hello ) yourself.

The source code is available on my github:

For convinience I've made a pre-built download you can directly run without compiling the entire thing. buildroot and linux take quite a while to build and might bitrot over time. With the pre-built download you can get started right away playing.

Beware that you need to open up your calculator and you might damage it, unrecoverable, not being able to boot into the HP software. Continue with caution.

Download the pre-built package from HERE and extract it to a folder. Download uuu from here .

Open the calculator (remove 4 screws from the back, open the housing with a small pry tool or guitar pick), plug it in via USB and press the RESET button while shorting 2 pads marked on the photo:

I've used an iFixit tweezer to short those two pads, they're tiny.

Use the uuu script to boot Linux in RAM:

uuu ./run_linux_in_ram.uu After a few seconds you should see a login prompt. You can login as root without a password. Type startx to start the graphical environment. Type sh ./doom.sh to start Doom.

I have not tested any of the NAND flashing scripts so use those at your own risk. The Goodix touchscreen should still work, but I cannot test that. If you have a unit with that type of screen, please test and let me know.

For the Prime G1 there is a forum topic and screenshot here and this port has actual source code and a modern 6.x kernel. I don't have G1 hardware so I cannot test this version. The port provides no downloadable image, you have to build one yourself. The instructions are on the page, but a bit tense. Note that