The Desktop


Tor said:
Vitel said:
LXDE is intended for low-performance machines like old XScale-based PDAs. Pandora seems to be much more powerful.
Don't trash the xscale.. :) The 400MHz XScale in my T3 is better at playing videos through TCPMP than my OMAP2 N800 with mplayer or the Nokia media player. On the T3 I don't even have to offline re-scale even, for the most part I can just play the original video. That's basically impossible with the OMAP2.
T3 probably has a separate chip for video decoding. My Zaurus-C1000 (PXA270) is very poor at video decoding. However I still use it as a PDA (bare console, no xorg/kdrive, cause Z is too slow for GUI IMHO).
 
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There's no reason you can't just set it up yourself. XFCE is probably a better solution for general users, but it's not like there's anything stopping anyone from installing different DEs on their own (I might go for e17, and use XFCE apps if necessary).
 
sebt3 said:
mali said:
KDE on my N800 was neat but just not practical.
Please elaborate.
I mean, sure plasma-desktop is clearly an overkill and won't be usable on that kind of screen.
But using plasma-netbook and a few kwin rule to fullscreen every app that should be maximized and you're done. Sure you'll need to slim this thing down (nepomuk and strigi turned off cause this is useless on that kind of device)
There is even a plasma-mobile version in the work that should accomodate the screen estate even more....

my 2cents
it's slow(er)
 
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grasshoppir said:
it's slow(er)
Busybox is faster than X11/XFCE. I mean seriously, just compare:

Booting to X11: 15 seconds
Booting to Busybox: 1 second

Displaying a message in X11: "notify-send 'Greeting' 'Hello World!' -i favorites -t 30000 -u critical" - 16 milliseconds
Displaying a message in Busybox: "echo Hello World!" - 10 nanoseconds

Clearly, we should all use Busybox.

What, you say? Busybox only supports a handful of commands*, can only be used for kernel debugging, and doesn't support any devices, internet access, or graphical UI? Well, who cares! It's faster!

*Supported commands:
[, [[, adjtimex, arping, ash, awk, basename, brctl, bunzip2, bzcat, bzip2, cal, cat, chgrp, chmod,
chown, chroot, chvt, clear, cmp, cp, cpio, cut, date, dc, dd, deallocvt, df, dirname, dmesg,
dos2unix, du, dumpkmap, echo, egrep, env, expr, false, fgrep, find, fold, free, ftpget, ftpput,
getopt, grep, gunzip, gzip, head, hexdump, hostid, hostname, httpd, id, ifconfig, ip, ipcalc,
kill, killall, klogd, last, length, ln, loadfont, loadkmap, logger, logname, logread, losetup,
ls, lzmacat, md5sum, mdev, mkdir, mkfifo, mknod, mktemp, more, mount, mt, mv, nameif, nc, netstat,
nslookup, od, openvt, patch, pidof, ping, ping6, printf, ps, pwd, rdate, readlink, realpath,
renice, reset, rm, rmdir, route, rpm, rpm2cpio, run-parts, sed, setkeycodes, sh, sha1sum, sleep,
sort, start-stop-daemon, strings, stty, swapoff, swapon, sync, sysctl, syslogd, tac, tail, tar,
tee, telnet, test, tftp, time, top, touch, tr, traceroute, true, tty, udhcpc, umount, uname,
uncompress, uniq, unix2dos, unlzma, unzip, uptime, usleep, uudecode, uuencode, vi, watch, watchdog,
wc, wget, which, who, whoami, xargs, yes, zcat
 
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What I meant with with my KDE comment is that I don't like windows on a small low-resolution screen. The scrollbars, frames, menus, etc take away too much space, imo. A full screen setup with a menu that slides into view when a button is pressed would be ideal for me. I'm neither a programmer nor Linux expert, so bear with me as I don't know the terminology ;)

edit:
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=40916&postcount=2
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=69058&postcount=88
 
mali said:
What I meant with with my KDE comment is that I don't like windows on a small low-resolution screen. The scrollbars, frames, menus, etc take away too much space, imo. A full screen setup with a menu that slides into view when a button is pressed would be ideal for me. I'm neither a programmer nor Linux expert, so bear with me as I don't know the terminology ;)
My post above was more directed towards grasshoppir but I'll add a couple more cents anyways:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=kde-netbook
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iULB1zE7EJE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U72wLrPZMho

etc...
 
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^ My post was directed at those who made reference to my post above ;)

That plasma stuff looks interesting but it's too much eye-candy which will need resources, I suppose. The new clutter interface in Fremantle is a similar approach, but I would prefer something totally boring and efficient instead, like in Diablo, just with a hidden menu. We had an interesting discussion in 2008 about it, iirc.

edit:
I think it was this thread:
http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/45677-pandora-desktop-environment-prototype-try-2-screenshots-and-videos/

I mentioned an idea somewhere, making the task manager slide in like in the game 'Starcraft', iirc. After that compositing was discussed.

Matchbox was dropped later, because of some bugs, I think. ED is a fan of full desktop environments so I guess he wasn't unhappy that it was dropped. I'm a little sad, though.
 
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dflemstr said:
grasshoppir said:
it's slow(er)
Busybox is faster than X11/XFCE. I mean seriously, just compare:

Booting to X11: 15 seconds
Booting to Busybox: 1 second

Displaying a message in X11: "notify-send 'Greeting' 'Hello World!' -i favorites -t 30000 -u critical" - 16 milliseconds
Displaying a message in Busybox: "echo Hello World!" - 10 nanoseconds

Clearly, we should all use Busybox.

What, you say? Busybox only supports a handful of commands*, can only be used for kernel debugging, and doesn't support any devices, internet access, or graphical UI? Well, who cares! It's faster!

*Supported commands:
[, [[, adjtimex, arping, ash, awk, basename, brctl, bunzip2, bzcat, bzip2, cal, cat, chgrp, chmod,
chown, chroot, chvt, clear, cmp, cp, cpio, cut, date, dc, dd, deallocvt, df, dirname, dmesg,
dos2unix, du, dumpkmap, echo, egrep, env, expr, false, fgrep, find, fold, free, ftpget, ftpput,
getopt, grep, gunzip, gzip, head, hexdump, hostid, hostname, httpd, id, ifconfig, ip, ipcalc,
kill, killall, klogd, last, length, ln, loadfont, loadkmap, logger, logname, logread, losetup,
ls, lzmacat, md5sum, mdev, mkdir, mkfifo, mknod, mktemp, more, mount, mt, mv, nameif, nc, netstat,
nslookup, od, openvt, patch, pidof, ping, ping6, printf, ps, pwd, rdate, readlink, realpath,
renice, reset, rm, rmdir, route, rpm, rpm2cpio, run-parts, sed, setkeycodes, sh, sha1sum, sleep,
sort, start-stop-daemon, strings, stty, swapoff, swapon, sync, sysctl, syslogd, tac, tail, tar,
tee, telnet, test, tftp, time, top, touch, tr, traceroute, true, tty, udhcpc, umount, uname,
uncompress, uniq, unix2dos, unlzma, unzip, uptime, usleep, uudecode, uuencode, vi, watch, watchdog,
wc, wget, which, who, whoami, xargs, yes, zcat
it's still slower smart-ass
 
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Vitel said:
Tor said:
Vitel said:
LXDE is intended for low-performance machines like old XScale-based PDAs. Pandora seems to be much more powerful.
Don't trash the xscale.. :) The 400MHz XScale in my T3 is better at playing videos through TCPMP than my OMAP2 N800 with mplayer or the Nokia media player. On the T3 I don't even have to offline re-scale even, for the most part I can just play the original video. That's basically impossible with the OMAP2.
T3 probably has a separate chip for video decoding. My Zaurus-C1000 (PXA270) is very poor at video decoding. However I still use it as a PDA (bare console, no xorg/kdrive, cause Z is too slow for GUI IMHO).
No, thats' the thing: As far as I know the T3 doesn't have a separate video decoding chip. And I'm looking at the TCPMP source code (it's GPL), and I see just straight-forward C code for e.g. the mpeg decoding. No calls to any co-processor or anything. And still it's fast.

edit: Spell 'video'
 
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mali said:
What I meant with with my KDE comment is that I don't like windows on a small low-resolution screen. The scrollbars, frames, menus, etc take away too much space, imo. A full screen setup with a menu that slides into view when a button is pressed would be ideal for me. I'm neither a programmer nor Linux expert, so bear with me as I don't know the terminology ;)

edit:
http://talk.maemo.or...916&postcount=2
http://talk.maemo.or...58&postcount=88
Thanks for clarification :D
These shoots are from KDE3 era. The project have been a long way since then.


mali said:
That plasma stuff looks interesting but it's too much eye-candy which will need resources, I suppose.
Sure eye candy are not free, but people tend to think that KDE will be a bloated mess. That I'm sure it won't be. hoo and by the way plasma-mobile is developped by an Nokia employee as part of his job. So if Nokia think that it will fit in your phone then it will surely fit in our pandora :D

mali said:
Matchbox was dropped later, because of some bugs, I think. ED is a fan of full desktop environments so I guess he wasn't unhappy that it was dropped. I'm a little sad, though.
Matchbox is a good solution for PDA and such. You'll be able to install it anyway from the Angstrom repository, so don't worry much :D
 
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^ Thanks for your encouraging words :) Pandora will be my Linux learning tool, so I guess I have some exercises there, already :)
 
mali said:
^ Thanks for your encouraging words :) Pandora will be my Linux learning tool, so I guess I have some exercises there, already :)

It's always a pleasure to help such a beautifull woman.






Err, what ??? the avatar picture is not you ????? ;D
 
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And I think we should use OSS instead of ALSA but that ship has possibly sailed forever :(
 
Exophase said:
And I think we should use OSS instead of ALSA but that ship has possibly sailed forever :(
Someone said a long time ago in one of those "Use the Pandora for an audio mixer" threads that the Pandora uses PulseAudio. So you can easily switch backends to OSS!
 
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dflemstr said:
Someone said a long time ago in one of those "Use the Pandora for an audio mixer" threads that the Pandora uses PulseAudio. So you can easily switch backends to OSS!

Oh god, PulseAudio. Maybe I should just rip the speakers out of mine.

PulseAudio is utter shit. Even when it actually works properly it still adds a ton of CPU overhead. Just what we want on our low power ARM devices, right?

It's not like using PulseAudio to wrap OSS even makes any sense. If it was just using straight OSS from the start everything would be very simple for everyone.
 
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^ As I understand the situation on Maemo 5, they use PulseAudio too and it is indeed a resource hog.
 
mali said:
^ Intarwebs fake all the time. I'm an advanced spam-bot ;)

Is that you?
boten...?
boten anna?
 
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