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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.
That's the key (emphasis mine)- GNOME is a DESKTOP environment. PDAs are HANDHELD. DESKTOP != HANDHELD.
"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.)
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
I want to know how you can call this a "configuration language" ;-) I'm not sure what it is but "language" isn't the word that comes to mind...
1001 0
11 999
100 KEYBINDINGS
102 7
427 Home
428 4
101 910
104 8 size
105
427 v
428 4
101 910
104 43
105
427 End
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.
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
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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
but then it broke, and now my PDA p's all day. :(
--
+&x
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.
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
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?
Wasn't this in a /. quickie not to long ago (like yesterday)?
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
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.
Transparent windows? Buggy, unstable themes? You must be thinking of Enlightenment. I've never seen a GTK+ theme be unstable.
--
No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Maybe Andover could make some extra $$ by offering to host a mirror of a soon-to-be slashdotted website. Sort of like slashdot effect insurance.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
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.
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 would be interested in running a *smaller, quicker gnome* on my PC.
/.'ed, so I guess I'll have to wait and see.
Actually, I just downloaded Gnome 2.0 and I love it. Its a little slow on my pentium pro w/ 64 megs but that's prolly cause I've got enlightenment 16.4 running on top of that. I really like the look, so I sacrifice for the speed.
I think the key is the definitions of "lightweight" and whether they are targeting today's PDA's or establishing a base for future PDA development. Unfortunately, the site is
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
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.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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
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!