[ILUG] simputer...

[Dave Airlie]

Agenda Vr3 all apps are GPL .... 16MB flash machine with X ..

Dave.

On Wed, 18 Apr 2001, John P. Looney wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 12:24:10PM +0100, Justin Mason mentioned:
> > Big problem however, will be this:  IMHO, the hardware is too low-cost
> > (and the screen real-estate too small) for many Linux apps to run; it'll
> > need porting work for most apps.
>
>  Not a massive problem, because...
>
> > Actually, now that I think about it, their situation is not as bad as it
> > was, first time I looked.  The handhelds.org projects have already put a
> > lot of effort into a free embedded Linux distribution, and ported some
> > apps to a small screen and a low-memory, flash-storage environment.
>
>  Indeed. There are three so far -
>
>  LISA - a very pretty and simple PDA OS, backed by Trolltech. I saw some
> of these machines in CeBit, and was shocked at how fabulous it was. Really
> professional and aimed at 16MB flash people - it uses embedded QT, instead
> of X to save on space at the price of making it difficult for not QT/C++
> heads to program for it (the main reason I never wrote anything for my
> Palm). Lisa.de will sell you this preinstalled on an iPaq.
>
>  Familiar - more "techy" distro, pushed by Handhelds.org, trying to get as
> much useful stuff on a 16MB flash as possible. Uses X etc, and it's
> developing at a rate of knots, but isn't 100% yet. Loads of "Er, something
> went wrong, and now I've a $650 paperweight" stories on the handhelds.org
> mailing lists...
>
>  Intimate - an insane PDA distro that requires a 370MB IBM microdrive.
> Everything from KDE to apache planned. Based on Familiar.
>
>  These will drive the PDA-app market, which is very different from apps
> for the desktop - something that Palm learned, but microsoft have not,
> yet. Sync tools are the most important part...second to those is wireless
> networking support...which they all have, though it requires a plugin.
>
> Kate
>
>

-- 
David Airlie, Software Engineer
http://www.skynet.ie/~airlied / airlied at skynet.ie
pam_smb / Linux DecStation / Linux VAX / ILUG person