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Re: [LUG] Choice in desktop environments

 

Simon Williams wrote:
> I'm sure GPE could be absolutely amazing if they sorted the UI issues.

Remember, GPE is Gnome-based. If you don't like Gnome, you may not like
how GPE develops. GPE is not going to mimic the way KDE does things. It
is not going to have lots of eye-candy and the look will be plain old
grey Gtk. True, there are backgrounds and some themes but that's how GPE
will be - functional, not necessarily pretty. In embedded systems, space
is always limited, eye candy is a complete waste.

> Maybe they already have- I haven't tried it in quite a while. The
> annoying thing about Opie is that it uses Qt/E, and although it is
> probably faster, it doesn't run X apps.

? Haven't tried Opie. GPE does run X apps. Anything written for Gtk that
could be scaled down to an iPAQ size screen, would run on GPE. One of my
aims is to get a form of GnuCash on an iPAQ or similar.

> Really it should be possible to
> recompile any app for an arm and run it on a PDA too (with maybe some UI
> changes), rather than have to port it to Qt/E or whatever.

It is a LOT more than simply cross-compiling. The screen size is an
immense limitation for many applications. Memory size is another very
awkward problem, as is storage. Embedded systems using Flash must avoid
constantly updating stored files from memory - read once and write once,
that's the idea - because embedded storage is vulnerable to repeat-write
failures. The more you write to a specific block, the higher the risk
that the block will fail.

> I have big plans for development for the Zaurus, but can't find time,
> and lack the knowledge. Partly what I'm going to university for I guess.

Zaurus is similar to an iPAQ - the externals/hardware differ but the
programming interface is much the same.

-- 

Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/


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