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GNOME GUI

Gnome On Your PDA? 85

Posted by CmdrTaco 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.
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Gnome on your PDA? More

Gnome on your PDA?

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  • No one follows the links anymore. (Score:3)

    by spankenstein ( 35130 ) on Thursday June 22, 2000 @11:19AM (#982051) Homepage
    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?
    .
    I'd love to see them myself, but with two mentions on /. now, I think I'll be waiting for them to get a new harddrive...
  • Don't get me wrong, GNOME is my favourite desktop environment...

    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.

  • People like bloated software... (Score:3)

    by XScott ( 169201 ) on Thursday June 22, 2000 @12:13PM (#982055)


    "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 [sourceforge.net] (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 [sourceforge.net], and I'm using the same theme [themes.org] 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 [enlightenment.org].
  • Have they recovered from yesterday? This thing was mentioned in the Quickies...
  • This theory also fits with the idea to target your software for future hardware. Since you might spend a year developing your product, you better optimize it for the hardware that will be available next year!


  • 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.
  • The problem is that by the time you remove X, write a new GTK layer, rewrite the libs, etc, you've basically rewritten all of GNOME. Making it pretty useless.

    Secondly, my issue isn't the bloat - it's the UI. MS made the same mistake. I don't want a desktop GUI glued onto a PDA, and this is where I feel PalmOS excels - it's perfect for a PDA. I'd never consider it on a desktop, just as I'd never consider GNOME for a PDA.

    People complaining about GNOME's speed generally have 3 problems. First, GNOME wants like 32MB RAM. If you have enough RAM, GNOME will run rather decently on 60Mhz+. Secondly, GTK pixmap themes are horrid (luckily the engine is getting rewritten). Thirdly, it's, like you said, faster than Windows, which is still pretty darn slow compared to Blackbox or Window Maker.
  • 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
  • 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?

  • 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!

  • Linux PDA info (Score:4)

    by wishus ( 174405 ) on Thursday June 22, 2000 @11:22AM (#982069) Journal
    If you're interested in putting Linux on PDAs, you might look at this stuff too:
    handhelds.org [handhelds.org]: Putting Linux on iPAQ and Nino
    linuxce.org [linuxce.org]: Developing a Linux Kernel for WinCE devices
    linux-vr.org [linux-vr.org]: running linux on your VR series device
    uclinux.org [uclinux.org]: linux/microcontroller project
    Yopy [samsung.co.kr]: Samsung's pre-installed Linux PDA with color/sound.

    hope this helps the interested.

    wish
    ---
  • Come on, guys, this has really got to stop. This story was just posted [slashdot.org] on Slashdot less than 24 hours ago. I can understand forgetting after three months or so.

    Does the Slashdot staff read the articles posted to Slashdot?

    --

  • Sorry, that was supposed to look like this: I always wanted a GNOME panel 64 pixels high on my PDA! Smack me for not using the preview option before I post...
  • 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?
    Basically, they can (and did) strip Enlightenment out of gnome and that's a huge performance increase.
  • 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.

    The anoucement is here :
    http://www.trolltech.com/company/announce/eqt-be ta.html.
  • Is there something smaller than the brain of a racist? Don't think so...
  • but then it broke, and now my PDA p's all day. :(
    --
  • Even their DNS is down, now.

  • PalmOS (Score:1)

    by weg ( 196564 )
    Could anyone write a STABLE System for those Handhelds first? PalmOS really is the hell :(
  • 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.

  • Re:Linux PDA info (Score:3)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) on Thursday June 22, 2000 @10:58PM (#982081)
    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.
  • Actually, a PDA needs a multiuser OS just as much (or even more, since you might actually have something important on it) than a desktop. root privilidges to install software, guest accounts for people who borrow it to play games, etc. The need for this doesnt go away on a PDA.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • I wonder if they'll fix all the gnome error messages first..

    nerdfarm.org [nerdfarm.org]
  • 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 [cadfu.com]

  • /. realy has it in for these guys. They /.ed them last night on a quickie and now this

  • 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)
  • Yeah.. slashdotet heavily!

    Mirror?

    Anyway.. Gnome is slow enough on my desktop snail-box.

  • Which PDA's are we talking about here? (Score:3)

    by Uruk ( 4907 ) on Thursday June 22, 2000 @11:04AM (#982093)
    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.

  • 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
  • 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.
  • Ironically, the footnote at the bottom of this page is, "Your code should be more efficient!"

    BTW, CmdrTaco, I found this really neat site explaining the rules of Shotgun [shotgunrules.com], too. Check it out. :-]

  • 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...
  • Does this mean they put X-Windows on a PDA? Ouch, is there room for anything else?
  • Wasn't this in a /. quickie not to long ago (like yesterday)?
  • The development environment for YOPY is 100% open. All software will be GPL, and you will be able to flash your own bios.
  • I couldn't agree more. Even if one assumes the that the PDA can run it with no problem I think it still takes up way too much screen space, which has been one of the many reasons people around here criticize CE.

    Ok so I lied half the people around here criticize CE just because it's MS.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The problem is that by the time you remove X, write a new GTK layer, rewrite the libs, etc, you've basically rewritten all of GNOME. Making it pretty useless.

    Gtk1.4/2.0 will have a framebuffer GDK port, just for embedded systems and stuff like this.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • They've tried to marry the look of GNOME to the feel of PalmOS, with a little extra glitz. They have not said 'we must have GNOME style menu bars and GNOME style dialog boxes' which is the mistake of CE.

    In fact I personally would rather take their results as a starting point for designing a desktop UI, since their design philosophy seems to be to begin with the user experience and construct everything with that in mind, rather than the 'feature/eyecandy shopping list' that is so prevalant with many GNOME and KDE apps.

    When it and PDA's for it are available, they will have plenty of extra capacity to handle it.
    John
  • With Windows 95, Microsoft designed it to be useable on current (486-33'ish) hardware, but sadly went downhill from there.
    John
  • is that the henzai user enviroment or the hentai user enviroment?
  • Isn't that how games are being developed? I mean, they literally spend years on development and when it comes out, it is still too much for most of today's hardware.

    ------------------
  • 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)

    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. :-)

    --

  • Well my proxy is configured not to tell any site what browser i'm running (it's usually Mozilla) so what happens if I am using Netscape2 behind it?

    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.

  • Well my proxy is configured not to tell any site what browser i'm running (it's usually Mozilla) so what happens if I am using Netscape2 behind it?

    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:
    The User-Agent request-header field contains information about the user agent originating the request. This is for statistical purposes, the tracing of protocol violations, and automated recognition of user agents
    for the sake of tailoring responses to avoid particular user agent limitations. User agents SHOULD include this field with requests.
    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".

    --

  • root access to install software? Why the fuck does my PDA need file permissions? Instead of a full blown multi-user OS you could always just have password protection in the main interface. On a PDA it is rather stupid to have a full directory tree when you've only got two things on the system, applications and user files. I don't want to type in a password to install tetris on my PDA. You may have time to waste but the rest of us don't.
  • Of course, if you want a future where your PDA is the popular thing of the day to write viruses for Im sure thats a healthy idea. You may have the time to constantly run viruscheckers and restore your data from backup or just plain buy a new PDA everytime it gets fried, but some of us dont.
  • 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)?
  • 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
  • ...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.
  • *Backline starts porting a distributed.net client*


    ==============================
    http://www.geek-ware.co.uk
  • 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 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 would be interested in running a *smaller, quicker gnome* on my PC.

    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 /.'ed, so I guess I'll have to wait and see.
  • You're obviously not very familiar with Web design. Slashdot's HTML code is actually quite good; it works in nearly any browser and has some pretty nice formatting elements. The utility you're suggesting would probably break some of the pages I've designed (I've occasionally relied on nbsp characters), and some of the quote marks it removes are probably required by the official HTML specification.

    I'd like to see what that program would do to my homepage [phroggy.com], 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.

    --

  • This is probably the worst idea that I've heard, ever. This is exactly what BeIA is designed for. Let's start using it.
  • Posted by 11223:

    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. When e makes the move to imlib2 (which is faster), it'll help (esp. given the mmx improvements in imlib2).
  • Because Yopy won't be out until October, whereas the iPAQ will be out in a week.
    -russ
  • If PDA-GNOME is lighter and faster than CE, it will work/sell well. Remember that all the weight most people see in GNOME is often due to the Enloghtenment WM that RH bundles it with.

    As for "The market agrees" with you, I have 2 objections:
    1 - The market agreed that Windows is the best OS in the workd ;-)
    2 - I have a Psion 5mx palmtop PC, that does NOT use WinCE but the Epoc32 OS: it's interface is really pleasant, but it work FAST on a 32Mhz Arm processor. In fact, there's event a Doom port for it... 8-)

    Just my 0.02 LIT (~= 0.00001 USD :)

    Ciao,
    Rob!
  • I'd like to KNOW who voted my comment as redundant. How could it possibly be redundant? I said that I was the one who submitted the /. link to PDABuzz -- and nobody else did that! So how could it be at all redundant??


    WWAaargh..!

  • Re:Which PDA's are we talking about here? (Score:3)

    by miahrogers ( 34176 ) on Thursday June 22, 2000 @11:15AM (#982131) Homepage
    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.
  • 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.
  • He has drug convictions? Could you please give a source of information for these allegations or are you just slandering him?
    Molog

    So Linus, what are we doing tonight?

  • hey, check out this [gnome.org] article over here.

    Wow, with so many ports of gnome, it's gonna be amazaing

    I cannot wait ;)

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