Port Ober Gpe Or Matchbox To X11?

[atomicthumbs]

Could someone port Matchbox (http://projects.o-hand.com/matchbox/) or GPE (http://gpe.handhelds.org/) to run on the newly ported X11 window System (http://archive.gp2x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0,8,1548)? That would be great.

 

[Lobo]

Yeah, I second that.
I'm quite a fan of Qtopia at the moment but that matchbox looks really sweet too.

 

[Parkydr]

I've started porting matchbox.

 

[Sonic-NKT]

nice to hear someone is working on it... do you plan to port GPE too?

 

[Orkie]

nice to hear someone is working on it... do you plan to port GPE too?

GPE is basically Matchbox with some extra stuff thrown on top anyway.

 

[Parkydr]

nice to hear someone is working on it... do you plan to port GPE too?

I haven't looked at gpe. I've compiled the matchbox library, common and desktop but I've had trouble getting it to run with my X libraries. I'm hoping Orkie's libraries will fix it.

 

[atomicthumbs]

nice to hear someone is working on it... do you plan to port GPE too?

I haven't looked at gpe. I've compiled the matchbox library, common and desktop but I've had trouble getting it to run with my X libraries. I'm hoping Orkie's libraries will fix it.

How's the porting going?

 

[Parkydr]

Not too well. I've managed to build my own X libraries and I first statically linked matchbox-desktop but it won't work because matchbox uses dynamically loaded objects. I've tried a dynamic linking and got it to run after including nearly every shared library in the world ever (maybe a slight exaggeration ) and now there's a segmentation violation and the extra shared libraries stop gdb working so I'm having to track it down with printf's.

So not too well

Update: just got rid of the shared libraries so gdb worked and found font problems. Rebuilt with xft disabled and it at least displays the desktop. I don't yet know what ignoring the task.so errors will have but I'll add some more bits like the panel and see what happens

 

[Orkie]

Not too well. I've managed to build my own X libraries and I first statically linked matchbox-desktop but it won't work because matchbox uses dynamically loaded objects. I've tried a dynamic linking and got it to run after including nearly every shared library in the world ever (maybe a slight exaggeration ) and now there's a segmentation violation and the extra shared libraries stop gdb working so I'm having to track it down with printf's.

So not too well

Update: just got rid of the shared libraries so gdb worked and found font problems. Rebuilt with xft disabled and it at least displays the desktop. I don't yet know what ignoring the task.so errors will have but I'll add some more bits like the panel and see what happens

How did you manage to build the libraries in the end?

 

[Parkydr]

How did you manage to build the libraries in the end?

I found I'd already built working libraries when I was trying to build the X server . I just hadn't tried them because my X server still doesn't work - segv's (I think it's something to do with xcursors). Matchbox also gave a fontconfig error which I thought was a bad library but I just needed a couple of extra files.

#define OptimizedCDebugFlags -O2 -msoft-float

in the host.def got the soft float working.

I've made a bit more progress, the lack of dynamic just seems to stop the display of the application folders on the desktop but they are there on the panel menu.
I have the clock and cpu/mem meter running (cpu seems to be 100% all the time!) and the terminal launcher starts xterm (I just need to add matchbox-keyboard now).

 

[nemonoid]

How did you manage to build the libraries in the end?

I found I'd already built working libraries when I was trying to build the X server . I just hadn't tried them because my X server still doesn't work - segv's (I think it's something to do with xcursors). Matchbox also gave a fontconfig error which I thought was a bad library but I just needed a couple of extra files.

#define OptimizedCDebugFlags -O2 -msoft-float

in the host.def got the soft float working.

I've made a bit more progress, the lack of dynamic just seems to stop the display of the application folders on the desktop but they are there on the panel menu.
I have the clock and cpu/mem meter running (cpu seems to be 100% all the time!) and the terminal launcher starts xterm (I just need to add matchbox-keyboard now).

How are you compiling matchbox? I've had some success using OpenEmbedded, I've managed to get all the matchbox components (matchbox-window-manager,matchbox-desktop, matchbox-panel and applets, mbinputmgr and matchbox-keyboard) up and running, though I had to use an ext2 formatted SD card and install the ipkgs to /mnt/sd. I was hoping to create a chroot enviroment or somthing in the SD card but I have had problems compiling coreutils.

If your interested maybe we could try working together to get somthing up and running. Drop me a PM or something.

--
nem

 

[Parkydr]

I'm compiling it from source using oopo's toolchain using a fat32 formatted card.

There are a number of deployment issues:

1. At the moment I just have a link from /usr/local to my matchbox directory (chroot could help with this)
2. How to run the X server - I assume it's in /mnt/sd/x11 which I think is ok
3. How are X applications going to be coordinated. I've added xterm - this is a standard X program and probably be released separately but them the install instructions are install the X server, install the standard X commands (most of which you may not need) and install matchbox.

Unrelated info:
It is gpm that's hogging the cpu. I added a 'nice' in x11 and it runs more smoothly but makes the cpu monitor useless.

 

[Orkie]

I'm compiling it from source using oopo's toolchain using a fat32 formatted card.

There are a number of deployment issues:

1. At the moment I just have a link from /usr/local to my matchbox directory (chroot could help with this)
2. How to run the X server - I assume it's in /mnt/sd/x11 which I think is ok
3. How are X applications going to be coordinated. I've added xterm - this is a standard X program and probably be released separately but them the install instructions are install the X server, install the standard X commands (most of which you may not need) and install matchbox.

Unrelated info:
It is gpm that's hogging the cpu. I added a 'nice' in x11 and it runs more smoothly but makes the cpu monitor useless.

Sorry, there's not a lot I can do about gpm at the moment (I'll look into it again in the future, but right now I don't have the time).

I think that all X applications should be installed under /mnt/sd/x11 in separate directories if possible (so /mnt/sd/x11/matchbox). That would make it easy to add/remove programs and would keep everything together and neat (there is no point having xterm, for example, separate from the X server because it is useless on its own).
It might be an idea to make a standard mechanism for managing X applications since I can see that it is going to get quite boring going through and updating scripts and configuration files each time you install something. I'll look into that when you release matchbox.

 

[nemonoid]

I've just released an very eary version of the GPE Palmtop Environment for the GP2X. There's still a lot of bugs but Abiword, Gaim, Dillo and Evince are working.

You can find more information and the download at: http://blog.nemonoid.org

--
nem

 

[Sonic-NKT]

sounds great, will test it right now!

UPDATE:
hmm gives me just a black screen.
do i have to have the x11 server allready installed?

edit:
oh yes, it needs x11... will test it again

UPDATE2:
hmm now i had a small controllable cube on a black screen for some time and after that the Xcursor and the X background, cursor was not controllable and nothing more happens

 

[nemonoid]

hmm now i had a small controllable cube on a black screen for some time and after that the Xcursor and the X background, cursor was not controllable and nothing more happens

Can you move the cursor if you run X standalone? As I was saying it still pretty buggy and you might need to play around on the command line to get things working...

I'm on #gp2xdev if you want some assistance...

--
nem

 

[Parkydr]

Works ok for me.

 

[Sonic-NKT]

hi, can you release a new version which works with the new version of the X-Server?
anyway GREAT WORK!!

EDIT: oh you just have to edit the gp2x-gpe.gpu and change the filename vor the xserver gpu...
anyway, works great perhaps a bit slow but i can live with it... and i need a small keyboard

PS: can you integrate in the next version of this the icq protocol for gaim? Thanks

another question, most text is small but good readable, it almost looks a bit scaled down. but in most programs the menu bar is bigger than anything else which makes some almost unusable, is there a way to scale those down?

 

[atomicthumbs]

Great work! I'll test it as soon as I unbrick my GP2X. Of course all the good games and programs come out right after it breaks... :angry:

 

[nemonoid]

I've just built a native version of GPE using OpenEmbedded. This combined with Orkie's new X release has improved the speed of things quite a bit as the binaries are optimized for now arm920t rather than xscale. This release is just a base GPE image, it doesn't include the likes of Abiword, Gnumeric or Evince. These will be released as updates via ipkg (ipkg is a package management system for embedded devices very similar to dpkg for Debian) as soon as I can find somewhere to host them.

If people want I can build an image with the above included. For now you can get the download from:

http://rapidshare.de/files/23172354/gp2x-g...15.tar.bz2.html

You should use this along with Orkie's latest (0.2) X server installed in /mnt/sd/x11

Please let me know you ideas, suggestions, bugs, etc.

--
nem