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Gnome On Your PDA?
An anonymous reader noted that
PDABuzz has a bit about
henzai (no, I hadn't heard of them either) working on a lightweight version of
GNOME designed for PDAs. The screenshots are pretty, but one has got to wonder if the requirements of gnome might be excessive for modern PDAs. Still, there's a lot of potential.
If anyone that posted could have possibly followed the link they would have seen a very nicely layed out screen that resembles PalmOS merged with GNOME. GNOME isn't really that slow and since this is for PDAs I'm fairly certain that it will be stripped down little (e.g. Not including things that are not needed). I think this is wonderful as GNOME is Open Source and has some good standards behind it. It also looks really sweet. By the way... I ran GNOME on a 75Mhz Pentium and it was still faster than Windows. I don't know what these people are doing to make it run so slow but I've never had any major speed issues.
Did you even look at the screenshots? /. now, I think I'll be waiting for them to get a new harddrive...
.
I'd love to see them myself, but with two mentions on
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
That's the key (emphasis mine)- GNOME is a DESKTOP environment. PDAs are HANDHELD. DESKTOP != HANDHELD.
You cold be having problems with your loopback configuration if you are running unstable kernels. The system will time out at boot before starting your window manager, and thats whats taking so long. Gnome uses loopback for communication for CORBA. Hence the 'n' for network in the name. Anyway, I had this problem until it pissed me off enough and I correctly configured my networking.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
"The screenshots are pretty, but one has got to wonder if the requirements of gnome might be excessive for modern PDAs."
Something being an excessive resource hog is the recipe for it to be a success. Look all around. We don't know what to do with the exponential growth of our computers, so we put increasingly bloated stuff on it.
On Win32, witness COM. What you mean you didn't want to load a 500k DLL just to put a new kind of button on the screen? Oops, that DLL loads MFC42.dll. There goes another 2 megs. It's ok though the machine can handle it, and it is a really cool button.
For the free software crowd, witness emacs. Forget the HURD, emacs is where their real operating systems development is going on.
Streaming video, Downloadable MP3s, Gnutella traffic (my first Unix account had a 500K quota - that would be about 30 seconds of sound), people LIKE resource hogs. I predict anything that is a pig and is applied to a machine that can barely handle it will be a success.
(Note: I didn't even have to pick on the easy targets like why Word 2000 feels slower on a 500 MHz machine than Word x.x did on an old 386.)
Anybody who's ever started e with a badly formed theme (and got the lovely pink borders) knows that e itself is very, very fast. It's imlib that's slow, and using all of those pixmaps.
I used E for several months. Then I tried out Sawfish (back when it was called sawmill) just to see what it was like. I immediately noticed that my machine seemed a lot faster, and many operations (like switching desktops) became less clunky. Sawfish uses imlib, and I'm using the same theme I used on E (except the Sawfish version, of course), so I don't think it's fair to blame imlib for E's "lack of speed". E is slow, its configuration language is a hack, and it's becoming more bloated all the time.
Have they recovered from yesterday? This thing was mentioned in the Quickies...
-- "Is this death or is this Ohio?"
Actually, the PocketPC makers are having a lot of trouble meeting the demand for the new PocketPCs. It's not easy to get one without being backordered. A quick check of eBay shows about 60 Palm IIIcs, 75 Palm IIVs, and 85 Palm Vxs for sale, but only 4 Jornada 540s, 2 Casio E-115s, and one iPaq H3650 for sale. And the bidding on the iPaq is already up to $135 over the normal street price! And to show how much people like their Cassiopeias, even though the new PocketPCs are out, there are still only 16 of the old models for sale. So, I can't say I agree with your assumption of the market agreeing with you. ;)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Yeah, man. If you checked out the screenshots, are they still in your cache? Because henzai's been slashdotted to hell.
That could be intersting to see. The problem with PDA is the lack of memory. People want to have EVERYTHING on a PDA, why don't they just buy a laptop. I used to use PDA's, (palm) but, there too limited.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
You certainly have the right to prove your own inferiority...
They'd need to do two things to make it work. First, they'd need an embedded version of GDK that worked straight to the display without X, to reduce the CPU/memory load on the system. Second, they'd need a custom window manager.
Even then it seems a little bit like overkill. Any application developed for GNOME is likely to be oriented towards a desktop display. The whole user interface would have to be rewritten for an app to be usable on the thing. That's the whole problem with WinCE (at least in its first two incarnations), its user interface was too complicated for a PDA.
My personal opinion is that we need yet another GPL'd GUI for PDA's. Yes, another API for developers to have to port their code to, but for running stuff on a handheld, you want to do a certain degree of rewriting to get the UI correct. Desktop apps and PDA apps are two different types of beasts in any case. I'm not sure we'd need as many layers as we do for the desktop environment. Probably a single integrated layer for graphics and display management which reduces the flexibility. But on a PDA every K counts.
In short, this is an interesting concept but I'm not sure I'd want to use it on anything less than a tablet display. For a handheld, forget it. I'd rather have some custom user interface set up.
Well I am a webdesigner so here's what I think of Slashdot's HTML.
It's bloated as fuck.
(and it's badly thoughtout)
The first thing is that practically the entire page is in one big table. Browsers can't render the table until it's got all the text as it never drops to HTML root until the very end (by "HTML root" I mean closing all tags and returning to BODY being your direct parent)
Slashdot could still use a columned layout without table tags by doing the following:
Make the side menus fixed width TABLEs (or DIV's) aligned to either side. By fixed width I mean either pixel, or the more preferable percentage of screen width. Ensure you have no (BR CLEAR=ALL). So you've got two TABLE tags aligned to each side of the page, now put your centre column in. Browsers will render the page as a three column layout but because of your HTML - yet it will all be viewable as it loads. Try doing this 3 column layout with several one cell TABLE tags (hell, if we're going to misuse TABLEs we may as well misuse them in a decent way).
Images are nicely squashed. Occassionally Taco forgets to make a topic image transparent, but images are done well.
Slashdot putting the 3 columns in a TABLE means my screen has to be wider than necessary. This means scrolling all over the place just to read a comment. Try resizing your window to sub-600 pixels or read slashdot on 200px wide PDA. It's fucking terrible to have to scroll right then left just to read a sentence.
Slashdot relies on the background colour white specified in the TABLE to be viewable at all! The BODY tag's BGCOLOR is black with black text. Netscape 2 and lower can't view it at all. Your phroggy.com does the same (nearly black bgcolor and text colour). Try it in Netscape 2 (or 1) then please consider removing your "best viewed in any browser" medal :)
Slashdot uses font tags all over the place: fixed sizes, no user preferences unless you want to screw all font definitions, no fallback fonts families, etc... font is evil.
I use NBSP where necessary too, certainly better than the 1x1 transparent GIF.
HTMLshrinker is a bit excessive in what it removes. But i'd say slashdot's HTML is about 20/30% larger than what it needs to be.
Still, good discussions, eh?
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
I think that Gnome for the PDA will be considerably trimmed down, so that it will run quickly on a low-performance system (which is kinda required for PDAs).
It seems people are taking the "Gnome on a PDA" too literally... They're probably just using Gnome as a basic graphical environment and stripping out everything else.
Although I don't use a PDA, if I did, I would be looking forward to picking this up -- I've always liked the Gnome interface.
I always wanted a GNOME panel 64 pixels high on my PDA!
www.poak.net
If you're interested in putting Linux on PDAs, you might look at this stuff too:
handhelds.org: Putting Linux on iPAQ and Nino
linuxce.org: Developing a Linux Kernel for WinCE devices
linux-vr.org : running linux on your VR series device
uclinux.org: linux/microcontroller project
Yopy: Samsung's pre-installed Linux PDA with color/sound.
hope this helps the interested.
wish
---
Does the Slashdot staff read the articles posted to Slashdot?
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Keeping
Enlightenment does not need to be "stripped out" of GNOME. E is a seperate program and was developed seperately from GNOME. If you don't like Enlightenment, you can just install a new window manager. It's not that hard.
Furthermore, GNOME is going to need a lot more stripping-down than just changing the window manager, if it is to be fit for PDA use.
-JD
Troll Tech have just announced Embeded Qt which use the framebuffer instead of X. They say that the memory footprint can be reduced to as much as 700k. With this version of Qt, it's become conceivable to have an embeded version of KDE, as not much of KDE depend directly on X.
e ta.html.
The anoucement is here :
http://www.trolltech.com/company/announce/eqt-b
Is there something smaller than the brain of a racist? Don't think so...
Georg
but then it broke, and now my PDA p's all day. :(
--
+&x
Even their DNS is down, now.
Bruce Perens.
Could anyone write a STABLE System for those Handhelds first? PalmOS really is the hell :(
Georg
That's what I meant when I said it's a hack. The original version of that post used, ahem, stronger language. I wasn't out to cause a flame-fest though, so I softened it considerably before posting it.
The way Enlightenment handles relative sizes and positions of "border parts" is also a joke, incidently. You need to specify the index of the part that the current part is based on. This naturally leads to problems if you add or remove border parts before a border part that others point at. E also doesn't do any checking for cyclic dependencies, so it's very easy to inadvertently make a theme that causes E to infinitely recurse as it tries to position/size the border part.
I don't think it would've been that hard to make a simple Yacc/Bison grammar for a real configuration language. Sawfish's adaptation of an existing scripting language is an even better idea though. (I wish it was either Guile or Python though...)
If you went to the site to check out the screenshots you'd see their PDA version of GNOME looks only mildly like our old friend on the desktop. The pastel finish to everything and the nice 3D-ness has been carried over but not many actual widgets which was the major failing of WinCE. About a month ago or so there was a story about KDE running out of a console with no abstraction though X. A similar concept can be used with a PDA, all the graphics are just output to the console framebuffer. A program like Finder (on Mac) or Explorer would be responsible for such things as program switching and display management. There's really no need for a networked GUI on a PDA. There's no use for a multi-user operating system on it either.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
or in black and green on my pilot. Would be cool to try out though. even just some more funky icons.
www.psion.com
As functional and more reliable as a Windows desktop.
Deleted
Having mailed Henzai, they are working on getting the whole system to work in 16Mb
They're stripping down gtk+ and gnome-libs to get it all to work in this.
Look again - don't the screenshots look a little gimped up ? And read their site: Cell Phones! come on.. what would be the point of THAT ?
"Will I be able to run applets?"
from a doubting thomas.
b0rk b0rk moose
I wonder if they'll fix all the gnome error messages first..
nerdfarm.org
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
What kinda resolution is there on an average PDA? I got 240x320 on my Casio? They are hard to read with windows CE... how does gnome look in b/w?
cad-fu: kicking CAD back into shape
/. realy has it in for these guys. They /.ed them last night on a quickie and now this
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
http://slashdot.org/articl e.pl?sid=00/06/21/2130258&mode=flat
"Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it."
This was covered in the quickies yesterday. However, PDA's are one of the few devices where a gui is really an essential part of the process (to some degree). Gnome might not be the BEST solution, but it is a solution, and where there is a will, there is a way.
I mean hell, they run windows on them too... (no offense M$, it was just too good to pass up)
Eh...
Frankly, even though I like GNOME a lot, I really wouldn't want to ever use it on my palm pilot.
I'm asking the subject of this post, because I can't imagine that they want to port it to a Palm. Maybe the new VII's that I haven't used have a huge speed increase over the 5's, but I think Taco is right to worry about whether or not the resources are enough to pull it off.
Think about it - a PDA is for taking small notes, remembering phone numbers, keeping your calendar, playing silly games, etc. IMHO PDA applications that don't respond pretty much instantaneously aren't going to be any good, since when I see that long lost friend on the street corner who is giving me his email address, I don't want to wait 2 minutes for the application to start up.
Who knows though? Maybe they can strip the hell out of some portions of gnome and make it fast and light. But at the same time, if they do that, will it still be GNOME?
I could see gnome on subcompact PC's, the really tiny laptops like VAIOs and so on, but not on a PDA.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
I've so always needed a transparent window option on my PDA.
and now I can change buggy, memory hogging unstable themes as much as I wish on the run too, hooray
Will I be able to switch terminal windows and kill the xwin process when it freezes? coool.
==============================
http://www.geek-ware.co.uk
==============================
PROUD to be GEEK
As far as I'm concerned, Windows CE is too much for a PDA. What makes PDA-GNOME any different? Just my opinion, but due to PalmOS products outselling WinCE products, I'd have to assume that the market agrees with me.
I'm 47, my eyes are not as great as they used to be, and if the display devices get any smaller than today's PDA's and cell phones, I'm going to go blind very soon...
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?
Does this mean they put X-Windows on a PDA? Ouch, is there room for anything else?
// TODO: fix sig
Wasn't this in a /. quickie not to long ago (like yesterday)?
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
The development environment for YOPY is 100% open. All software will be GPL, and you will be able to flash your own bios.
-o Disclaimer: My employer doesn't even agree with me about C indentation style o-
Of course you could make a version of slashdot that was both standards compliant and rendered nicely on most browsers. Browser detection is not against W3C standards. Quit sucking up to slashdot.
-o Disclaimer: My employer doesn't even agree with me about C indentation style o-
Think about it. If they can optimize GNOME until it runs well on a PDA, then the same optimizations should work on your desktop. I'd be impressed by the profiling and fat-reduction efforts this would take, and the end result should be impressive.
Just so long as they don't just try to 'squeeze it all in', instead of optimizing it all out.
Ok, I meant ORB is the underpinning of Gnome, and I know they want Bonobo to be a standard part of the system once it's all done. While it does run fine without bonobo, what about all the Gnome apps that will make use of it, and possibly require it in the future?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards." - Marcin
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
is that the henzai user enviroment or the hentai user enviroment?
This is true, but just because it's CPU-intensive for the browser doesn't necessarily make it bad code.
Slashdot has a black border around the edge of the page. It's not very useful, but vaguely neat-looking. The only other way to get this would be to convince each browser to render the page with no margin, and artificialy create black-background margins with the tables you suggest - except that each browser handles this differently and many of them won't do it at all.
As for Netscape 2, well, it would be nice if there were an easy way to support it, but there isn't, and almost nobody uses it anyway. However...
Your phroggy.com does the same (nearly black bgcolor and text colour). Try it in Netscape 2 (or 1) then please consider removing your "best viewed in any browser" medal
The code you saw won't render decently in Netscape 2, but if you actually use Netscape 2 to view the page you'll see that you get a different version that does render properly. If you don't have Netscape 2 handy, go to any page but the main home page, and over on the right in the Themes box click the link to the Simple theme.
Slashdot uses font tags all over the place: fixed sizes, no user preferences unless you want to screw all font definitions, no fallback fonts families, etc... font is evil.
Sorry, but you can't complain about the use of the font tag and complain that Netscape 2 won't render the page. As for me, I've recently started learning how to use CSS and will be moving away from the use of the font tag, but I do try to use it responsibly.
I use NBSP where necessary too, certainly better than the 1x1 transparent GIF.
I use nbsp for indenting paragraphs, but I've started using a 1x1 transparent gif as a placehlder in table cells. I had been using nbsp, but then I had a table cell that was only a few pixels high, and an nbsp wouldn't fit unless I made the font size really small, and if the browser was set for huge fonts it would break anyway.
Still, good discussions, eh?
Definitely.
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Actually, i've been getting sites lately refusing content when they get confused in my proxy. So i'm making my proxy randomly choose several major browsers and get them to cycle my HTTP headers. Huzzah!
Sure this is a trivial example but there's no reason why I shouldn't be able to do this. Shoddy HTML is the only reason why I can't.
nbsp for indenting paragraphs? eh? what's wrong with.. um... CSS p{text-indent:1em} or some such? I read somewhere that Blynx pauses for NBSP as it's considered more purposeful than a breaking space. Many blind people are angry waiting for you!
(still, it's not like they can do anything about it)
Sorry, but you can't complain about the use of the font tag and complain that Netscape 2 won't render the page
Just watch me! :) If I use any HTML standard it still works in older browsers. The uses of font are few (well, none) and when most modern day browsers support CSS you can implement fonts without rubbing the open sore that is the font tag.
This is true, but just because it's CPU-intensive for the browser doesn't necessarily make it bad code
It's CPU intensive for no good reason, good point though. But I was more thinking about slow connections that get drip-fed HTML on a 33.6 or 14.4. I share a 56 dialup and it gets terribly slow. Many times I just quit a page if it's too slow and read what it's got so far (yes, slashdot). Good HTML should have been able to do that throughout the process (or fairly regularly). It also makes my screen wider than it has to be (try reading slashdot on a 500px WebTV, or a 200px PDA or something, or a 320px DOS browser). These types of devices now have a choice of either scrolling all around the page just to read a sentence or ignoring the markup. It's all rather strange.
I think i'll take a lie down.
vaguely neat-looking
Well that merits breaking browsers, eh?
Yes... A nap would do me good. Must find myself a job too.
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
My site only uses browser detection to decide which theme you get by default. You can change themes if you aren't getting one that's appropriate for your browser. If it doesn't recognize your browser, you get the Simple theme, which works on anything (including Mozilla and Netscape 2).
Actually, i've been getting sites lately refusing content when they get confused in my proxy. So i'm making my proxy randomly choose several major browsers and get them to cycle my HTTP headers. Huzzah!
If you're deliberately mangling the User-Agent string (in violation of the HTTP specification), it's not my fault. You might want to set your proxy server to send something like Mozilla/4.0 (not really, but that's my business) which should work for any Web sites (unless you use Internet Explorer and the server is checking for MSIE to give you code that renders better in MSIE than in Netscape).
Sure this is a trivial example but there's no reason why I shouldn't be able to do this. Shoddy HTML is the only reason why I can't.
From RFC 2616, section 14.43:
If you randomize the User-Agent string at your proxy server, you can expect your results to be strange.
nbsp for indenting paragraphs? eh? what's wrong with.. um... CSS p{text-indent:1em} or some such? I read somewhere that Blynx pauses for NBSP as it's considered more purposeful than a breaking space. Many blind people are angry waiting for you!
When I started doing Web design, I looked forward to the coming release of Netscape 3, which (on Windows) finally supported more than 16 colors of text. I haven't kept up with some of the newer stuff, including CSS. I'm slowly beginning to get off my lazy ass and fix my code. As for blind people, well, I don't have any non-visual browsers to test my code on.
If I use any HTML standard it still works in older browsers. The uses of font are few (well, none) and when most modern day browsers support CSS you can implement fonts without rubbing the open sore that is the font tag.
Older browsers ignore CSS code. If I rely on CSS code for my layout, I don't call that "working".
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Which parts of GNOME are they using? Are they just using the component libraries, or the whole shebang? Are they using GTK+? (shudder). I want their source and window manager (think it'll look good at 1152x900)?
-o Disclaimer: My employer doesn't even agree with me about C indentation style. o-
OK, I posted this in the quickie, but I _have_ to say this again.
GNOME on a pda? Can you say _SLOW_? I thought you could.
Seriously, on my two-year-old PII/300 64m GNOME/sawmill takes about 15 seconds to start up! Granted, this is abnormal -- I think I'm having some issues with X that are slowing things down. Still, even the memory requirements would be too much anyway. How much memory does this thing even have? If it's less than 32, then GNOME will never run. Any more would be prohibitively expensive. And forget about running anything else while GNOME is active.
Don't get me wrong, GNOME is my favorite desktop environment -- it's just not right for everything.
nuclear cia fbi spy password code encrypt president bomb
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
...that I could get really pretty screen shots from Gnome on my 486/66 with 16 meg RAM. When X wasn't trying to load anything, it looked very nice. When I tried to load something it still looked nice... the same screen looked really nice, I never did see the next screen for, say, Netscape, but the desktop still looked very nice indeed. You can't base anything except video card quality on screenshots. It may still run like crap, even if it is more visually stunning than anything else.
The chains are broken
Loki is free
Ragnarok is at hand...
*Backline starts porting a distributed.net client*
==============================
http://www.geek-ware.co.uk
==============================
PROUD to be GEEK
So what about ORB and Bonobo? These aren't exactly lightweigts. And these are really the underpinnings of Gnome, so are they going too? Do I really want a full modular component object system on my PDA? I mean, the interoperability is cool, but I don't need to embed a ton of different kinds of data in one document on a PDA. I mean, it's just a PDA. A glorified notepad. Everyone's complaining about the speed of Gnome on their desktops. The reason for that is because there's this complext object system underneath it that will slow down even a new desktop system. What'll it do to a PDA? I dread another WindowsCE coming out of this... a good system, but horribly overpowered.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards." - Marcin
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I might be wrong on this, but methinks Gnome does not depend directly on X, rather it depends on GDK. You can then port GDK to any back-end (such as Xlib) you want.
I'd like to see what that program would do to my homepage, and whether the resulting code would render (and in which browsers, if it renders at all). Granted, there's some unnecessary whitespace, but really, do a few bytes matter? There's no way I could work on the code if I stripped the whitespace out; I'd have to maintain original copies and run this program again every time I changed something.
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This is probably the worst idea that I've heard, ever. This is exactly what BeIA is designed for. Let's start using it.
Because Yopy won't be out until October, whereas the iPAQ will be out in a week.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
..last post?
Mr. Last Post
WWAaargh..!
I've never taken the jump of buying a PDA.
THey are VERY enticing.. but I just can't justify it. It's a toy. And I can't afford more toys! =)
There always seems to be a simpler, faster, way of doing whatever the PDA is supposed to do.
Before I get modded for being offtopic... Porting Gnome to a PDA just seems to be crying for "What the hell for??"
I can remember people in University that had their fancy HP Calculators with compilers on them! Just to create something as simple as "Hello, World!" with the HP48G interface was excruciating. It's a toy. It isn't news for nerds.
teenie weenie screens
fake pencil to make things work
they make my brain hurt
antidigerati
Easy does it!
This article has been submitted already, 1334 minutes ago. No need to try again.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
hey, check out this article over here.
;)
Wow, with so many ports of gnome, it's gonna be amazaing
I cannot wait