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

[jazzman@exdomain.org]

Some further digging reveals that perhaps GPE didn't die entirely. It 
looks eerily similar to Matchbox (matchbox-project.org). Does anyone know 
if they are related in some way? Maybe this is where I should be looking.

Thanks again
Marc

On Tue, 28 Dec 2010, Rich Freeman wrote:

> 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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