[PLUG] Smartphone-Like UI for X?

[jazzman@exdomain.org]

Hey all,

I've got two little hobby projects I'm tinkering with that have a similar 
requirement and I'm stumped. I thought if anyone would have some good 
input it would be you guys.

Basically what I'm looking for is a smartphone style (iPhone UI, Palm 
WebOS UI) window manager that I can add to a standard linux distro or even 
build a custom mini-distro around. Ideally I'd like the same basic gesture 
type interface as WebOS (swipe left and right and up/down to navigate 
pages of icons, etc). I looked at GPE, but it seems like it's not actively 
maintained and the site it's hosted on (linuxtogo.org) is spotty in terms 
of access.

Now, a quick overview of the projects I'm tinkering with in my freetime

Project 1: I have an old (circa 2004) tablet PC. It's an HP TC1000. It has 
a 1ghz Transmeta Crusoe processor, 512mb of ram, and a 40gb laptop hard 
drive in it. I installed Debian 5 on it and tweaked it a bit for 
performance and functionality (I got pen input, screen rotate when 
keyboard is attached/removed, etc. all working with some scripting, etc.) 
It could still be a little quicker, I think, and I'd like to use a 
smartphone like window manager on it to make it more of a general use 
"tablet" and less of a "laptop with a touch screen." Yes I use it at work, 
and since I work for HP it's fun to take it into meetings and have people 
stare at it like "What the heck is that?!?!" I'm hoping to be able to do 
simple things with it like take handwriting notes (recognition would be 
awesome), draw diagrams when necessary, browse the web, etc. Basically, 
the things you do with a tablet! :)

Project 2: I have a few old touchscreen thin clients. They're 1ghz VIA 
processors and 1gb of ram with a compact flash slot for the storage. I 
have a wireless card for them. What I want to do is make a "tabletop 
appliance" with a smartphone style UI where each icon is just a quick link 
to an app/website I would use in the morning when I grab breakfast before 
I leave. I'm thinking something like I wake up, walk into the kitchen, 
press the on button, then click the "traffic" icon and have it load chrome 
with google maps and traffic, or click "weather" and have it open weather 
sites. I think a smartphone UI would be ideal for this. I could probably 
do it pretty simply with a web UI, but I was hoping for something a little 
more dynamic.

Does anyone have any ideas? Maybe there's already a distro that does 
everything I want? I've already looked at Android-x86, but it doesn't have 
a lot of the drivers for the tablet PC and I'd need to find/build all 
sorts of standard apps for the tablet to make it work right. I was looking 
to keep with a pretty standard distro or at least a custom distro I could 
easily build standard apps for. I also looked at EmDebian but it appears 
the "build from scratch" option has stalled in terms of it's development. 
It's aimed mainly at arm based devices anyway.

Hoping you guys can help!
Thanks
Marc
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug