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Gnome On Your PDA?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the talk-about-your-overkill dept.

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.

6 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. No one follows the links anymore. by spankenstein · · Score: 3

    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.

  2. People like bloated software... by XScott · · Score: 3



    "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.)

  3. Linux PDA info by wishus · · Score: 4

    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
    ---

    1. Re:Linux PDA info by Graymalkin · · Score: 3

      Man I have always wanted a multi-user OS with a virtual file system on a handheld device. Not only is multiple users of a single handheld device not very viable (if you're so poor that your family shares a handheld maybe you ought to buy food rather than a PDA) but it adds excess code to what should otherwise be a very compact kernel. What I would like to see is a GNU real-time OS to be developed for handhelds. Maybe a real-time kernel and major system controls is under 100k of memory? Then maybe another 200k for a GUI. Hey wow, then not only do you have a GNU handheld OS but you could port it to such things as point-of-sale devices and other such things.

      --
      I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
  4. Which PDA's are we talking about here? by Uruk · · Score: 3

    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
    1. Re:Which PDA's are we talking about here? by miahrogers · · Score: 3

      Did you even look at the screenshots?

      This isn't the same gnome you would be running on a desktop. It's more of a gnome that complies with the early mac "finder" desktop, and the palm "desktop". It has large colorful icons, and none of the desktop-essential clutter that we've seen on Gnome or winCE.