Xorg With Breakout Box

[danboid]

I've already brought this one up in the general discussion but I think this forum is more appropriate.

The one program which would totally revolutionise the GP2X would be an accelerated xorg server which takes advantage of the GP2x co-pro

http://www.x.org/

Once this is achieved, if you own a breakout box too then you can use your GP2X as a full computer and run programs such as firefox, amule, gaim (MSN and Yahoo! messenging), xchat, gftp etc etc! Who might be up to this all important (for GP2X owners at least) task?

This would inevitably lead us to the need of a fully-fledged yet memory efficient Linux distribution for the GP2X, but thats already been done for us!

http://pdaxrom.org/

pdaxrom runs very well on Sharp Zaurii which also have an ARM cpu and also have 64MB RAM just like the GP2X so porting should be a breeze- it just requires someone write that X11 server w/ accelerated graphics and TV-out support.

Fingers crossed!

 

[Gruntfuggly]

Hmmmm ... XPilot....

 

[racoon]

This is just what I am talking about!

Add a usb keyboard, mouse, storage, use your TV-Out, you get a nice 640x screen and you are able to do most office work and surfing.

Anybody interested in working on this? Is the GP2X powerfull enough to run this specified distribution?

 

[Anhaedra]

I'm curious why anyone would want to do office work or surfing on their GP2X. It seems like it would be a pain to carry a keyboard, mouse, breakout box, and the GP2X around with you when you could accomplish the same thing with a PDA or laptop.

 

[Racer445]

Why I would use it is because of all the games that require X. XTux, Frozen Bubble, and more.

Plus more applications. Web browsers, media players, etc.

 

[Gruntfuggly]

It would be great to surf using the GP2X - I can't ever get my missus of my laptop, so wireless surfing would be the way to go - is there a browser with a virtual keyboard?

 

[kardasan]

Have you actually seen apropriate X driver or are you just giving an idea? As far as I'm concerned we can only use software accelerated X server and only if it will compile...correct me if I'm wrong. But working GTK lib would be great...but wait, GTK requires xlibs...now look, what I've found :> http://packages.debian.org/testing/libs/libgtk+2.0-directfb0. What do you devs think?

 

[danboid]

racoon: pdaxrom has been ported to the PS2 already and that only has 32MB RAM. The original Linux-based Zauruses (SL-5000/5500) had a 206Mhz StrongARM processor very similiar to the GP2X and they can run pdaxrom.

Anhaedra:

Why would you want to

* because it would be incredibly cool being able to turn a handheld console into a full computer- do that with a PSP!

* not everybody has a laptop or PDA, this is certainly more portable than 90% of PC's

* Increase the geek cool factor of the GP2X 10x

* because we can

and why not?

kardasan:

Are you sure that getting some kind of hardware accelerated X11 is an impossibility on the 2X? The specs I've read claim the co-pro is able to do 2D graphics acceleration- why could it not be used to accelerate X if someone wrote an X server especially?

 

[racoon]

Of course. there is no 3D GPU in the GP2X, but there is a 2D graphics accelerator, which is NOT the second GPU, I don't know it really, but I guess if we can get to run the framebuffer, it should be possible to get X.org (tinyx or whatever) to run. And if not, the specified package might help?

I am no dev but this is my guess.

We really don't need a fully featured X with glass-windows and so on, just a basic run to run the applications and games which require X.

 

[Anhaedra]

* because it would be incredibly cool being able to turn a handheld console into a full computer- do that with a PSP!

Well really it isn't much like a full computer, I mean, you have no ethernet, you have no optical drive, you have no 3D acceleration, you have no wireless, you are limited to a resolution of 320x240 unless you want to use it on a TV, which isn't ideal for computers because of interlacing, and you are limited to 64MB of RAM, most of which is already used most likely. (this would be a problem with browsing, Firefox uses 30ish MB just doing nothing, and upwards of 120MB sometimes, so paging would kill your SD) And why couldn't the PSP do this? It has USB too, so all you need to do is port Linux to it.

 

[Feeg]

:lol: "all you need to do is port Linux to it"

Sounds easy enough.

I think the main reason getting an X server running on the GP2x is that it is -the- standard for graphical interfaces under Linux. That means - more potential applications and games for porting, more librarys and toolkits to play with and less hackery required if we want to share data, like for PIM software, between the GP2x and the PC.

Sure, the hardware has its limits, but we should at least try to reach them and see what result we get. Nay- it is our duty! :blink:

 

[slygamer]

It's a games/media player. That's it. The only thing I have found X to be good for is to waste screen space with huge window decorations. It will also waste memory, leaving precious little for actual applications. How long will your NAND or SD card last when it is getting its read/write life used up by incessant use of temp disk space or swapping memory pages? Any games you want ported to the GP2X should nto have to carry the baggage of X with them. There is no need for games to require X. A game just uses X to get a window onto a larger display. On the GP2X you do not need that. How useful are visual buttons on a windowed interface if you don't have a touch screen? Sure, you could connect a mouse, and a keyboard, perhaps even a TV so you can get a fuzzy interlaced display, but then you've got a mess of cables with a GP2X lost in there somewhere, and it still has the same SD and NAND memory that it had before.

 

[Feeg]

Sure, if you see the only application of X as being a desktop replacement.

I think the example of a BoB + TV + input devices takes it to an extreme, but plenty of PDAs are designed with a windowing interface. Using a standard like X means that if you want to multi-task basic graphical applications (email reader, calender, mp3 player etc) you can do so without each application developer having to solve problems like task switching and resource sharing.

Having a suite of small useful applications available through a very light window manager appeals to me as an addition to a menu driven set of lower level programs like hardware intensive games.

I certainly wouldn't suggest X as a general interface though, and I reckon the point about thrashing the NAND and SD card to death is a good one to keep in mind.

It's still a cool idea.

 

[danboid]

Anheadra:

"you have no ethernet"

wrong! There a plenty of USB to ethernet adaptors suppored by Linux, or you could go for a USB wifi adapter like the ralink or prism ones

"no optical drive"

wrong again! Ever heard of USB CD/DVD burners? You can get keyboards with mini-USB hubs built in (like the iMac keyboards for example) to help plug all your devices in too.

Blurry TV ouput? You're not going to be doing any DTP, photo or video editing on this setup so why do you care as long as you can make out the text?

"And why couldn't the PSP do this? It has USB too, so all you need to do is port Linux to it."

Much easier said than done, unlike with the GP2X. A quote from http://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/PSP

"There is none [a Linux Port to PSP] and there won't be any despite some people's foolish claims and attempts. The hardware lacks a TLB and as such is too primitive to run a real Linux kernel. µClinux would be a potential alternative but that would mean no binary compatibility with existing Linux/MIPS."

This would seem to be confirmed by the fact that the PSP Linux project has seen zero activity in the last year. Also, the PSP only has 32MB RAM which again severely limits its chances of doing anything useful under Linux/X11. On top of this you can't run homebrew stuff on the latest/normal PSP firmware and you wouldn't have a TV out. GP2X wins hands down as a basic Linux box.

64MB is enough to run Firefox but you can't run much alongside it, true. Really I would recommend running a lighter browser like gtk-webcore

http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/

You potentially could use it on the GP2X screen but that wasn't my intention. Of course I wasn't expecting any opengl windowing effects, but you can get transparencies and run the enligtenment window manager on a Zaurus in 64MB, but the Z is about 3x faster than the GP2X when overclocked so I dunno how it would handle transparent windows.

Plenty of Zaurus and PPC users run their OSs' off SD cards without any problems. I was thinking of having a Linux bootloader program that you would run as a util on your GP2X and then it boots off a USB2 hard drive which serves as your root disc. Hard drives will die eventually too of course.

 

[slygamer]

Also, the PSP only has 32MB RAM which again severely limits its chances of doing anything useful under Linux/X11.

As does Linux on the GP2X.

64MB is enough to run Firefox but you can't run much alongside it, true.

You keep forgetting that Linux only sees 32MB on the GP2X.

 

[Anhaedra]

Anheadra:

"you have no ethernet"

wrong! There a plenty of USB to ethernet adaptors suppored by Linux, or you could go for a USB wifi adapter like the ralink or prism ones

"no optical drive"

wrong again! Ever heard of USB CD/DVD burners? You can get keyboards with mini-USB hubs built in (like the iMac keyboards for example) to help plug all your devices in too.

Sure I guess, if you like to have a mess of devices strewn about.

 

[Feeg]

Plenty of Zaurus and PPC users run their OSs' off SD cards without any problems. I was thinking of having a Linux bootloader program that you would run as a util on your GP2X and then it boots off a USB2 hard drive which serves as your root disc. Hard drives will die eventually too of course.

I was thinking about this, but I'm wondering if you might take a performance hit, accessing a page file/swap partition over USB2. Totally guessing of course, I can't really get my head around the calculation required to work out whether the bandwidth and speed would be sufficient over a single host controller also running input peripherals.

As for window manager, to each their own, but I think Enlightenment with transparencies might be pushing it a bit though. I think I'd look at FVWM2, with all that scriptability you could emulate the functionality of E and get a lot of flexibility out of the various buttons.

 

[danboid]

"Linux can only access 32MB of RAM"

At the moment that may be the case, but I'm sure it won't last much longer.

As for the USB2 bandwidth- its only really the HD that consumes anything significant. USB2 has a max throughput of 480mbps and a decent drive might deliver around 15MBps or 120mbps so there is theoretically plenty of bandwidth- easily enough to have a ethernet port and optical drive too.

 

[torpor]

bah, who needs X11 when there's a perfectly good /dev/fb0 that you can point librsvg/cairo at ...

 

[Feeg]

bah, who needs X11 when there's a perfectly good /dev/fb0 that you can point librsvg/cairo at ...

Damn. Now -that- makes sense.