Re: [PLUG] Smartphone-Like UI for X?

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 2:59 PM,  <jazzman@exdomain.org> wrote:

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.

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.

Android and GPE would have been my two suggestions.  I never tried GPE though I had looked at it a while ago briefly for something.  While it seems to be a somewhat-idle project it seems like at least some distros support it (including Gentoo - which actually isn't a bad choice for a semi-embedded system if you strip out the build tools before deploying it (or you can leave them in if you have plenty of storage - RAM is usually the bigger constraint which Gentoo excels at).  

I suspect though that GPE had a lot of wind taken out of its sails by Android, which obviously has a lot more backing.  The obvious advantage of GPE is that it is a more normal distro in terms of the API - it is basically just another lightweight X11 desktop environment I think.  The obvious advantage of Android is that this is where everything is going and it gets a lot of attention, but you will be limited to android apps.  As you've pointed out most of the Android work is focused on ARM, and the app selection is optimized for phone screens right now but that may change when Android tablets take off.

Rich

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