On Mon, Jul 09, 2012 at 10:06:11PM +0100, Burton, Ross wrote: > Hi all, > > I've been mulling over a replacement for the Sato environment for some > time now, so I think it's time to talk about my thoughts and get more > feedback from users of oe-core. > > Some background: back in 2007[1] Sato was designed to be an > reference/demo PDA environment for mobile devices with (relatively!) > high-DPI but physically small screens[2], such as the Sharp Zaurus and > Nokia 770/N800/N810/etc. It was designed to look visually distinctive > compared to the competition at the time, and demonstrate all the > features that a handheld PDA should have (at the time). I think it's > fair to say it mostly succeeded at that although it didn't exactly set > the world on fire. > > Fast-forward five years: Sato is still part of oe-core and showing > it's age and unsuitability for the requirements that oe-core now has > compared to the original design requirements for Sato. > > So, what does oe-core require from a graphical environment? As this > is oe-core the list should be fairly short, so how about: > - some way of launching arbitrary applications > - a terminal > - a text editor > - a web browser > - network configuration > - an interactive test suite for verifying that various pieces of > hardware are working: play a media file, show touchscreen events, > display key events, and so on. More about this later. > - lightweight > > There's also a set of anti-requirements: > - no half-baked PIM suite > - no games > - no giant dependency stack or tight integration into the rest of > oe-core. Pulling the Sato replacement out entirely, or reusing parts > of it, should be easily done. > > Re-using an existing environment is one option but I don't think it's > a great one. LXDE is very minimal but the Windows 95 aesthetic isn't > exactly attractive, XFCE is surprisingly large these days. We don't > really want much, so I think maintaining our own shell is a worthwhile > investment. > > Hopefully there aren't any objections so far? I'll assume not, and > introduce my proposal for Project Shuku[3]. > > Shuku will be a descendent of Sato, that is continue to use the > Matchbox Window Manager, Desktop, and Panel; although the latter two > will be updated for GTK+ 3. All applications will be removed and > fully reconsidered when adding back, so the text editor might well > change from leafpad to something that had a release in two years, > Midori is looking like a good web browser choice instead of Web, the > PIM suite removed, and so on. > > The interesting bit is then the test application. We need a graphical > environment so that we can run applications specific to our needs (and > the desktop handles this fine already) and verify that the system is > in fact working correctly. Currently this is done in an ad-hoc > manner: using the music player to play audio files, gst-launch to play > videos, poking at the the touchscreen to verify that it works. I'm > proposing a specific test application so that instead of attempting to > use general purpose applications as test tools, we have a specific > tool. > > For example, when playing back a video file it's important that any > hardware acceleration available is actually used. The test tool could > play the file using GStreamer's playbin and then display the resulting > pipeline so you can verify that VAAPI is being used, the correct audio > sink, the correct network source, and so on. To verify that the input > devices are working, list them at the evdev level and let you see the > raw events, display touches, and so on. > > I've also been considering the brave new world of Wayland. Whilst > porting to GTK+ 3 all of the X11-specific code can be logically > separated so that a small Weston plugin can be written that integrates > the pieces together. This will give a Wayland-native graphical > environment that is visually identical to the X environment. > > There's plenty of other things to discuss -- visual design and so on > -- but that can wait for another day. > > So those are my thoughts. Any comments?
Why not use enlightenment? It works good with meta-efl layer and it looks like there will be E17 release after all :) http://e17releasemanager.wordpress.com/ so we won't need to use so much stuff from svn recipes. Cheers, > > Ross > > [1] Five years ago! > http://www.burtonini.com/wordpress/2007/08/01/poky-linux-3-0-blinky-released/ > [2] QVGA, for example, was explicitly not a target. The Sharp Zaurus, > a typical test device, had a VGA screen. > [3] In the glorious tradition of naming projects by translating words > to other languages, I ended up with 尗 (U+5C17) which means "younger of > brothers", and Shuku is one of the pronunciations. > > _______________________________________________ > Openembedded-core mailing list > Openembedded-core@lists.openembedded.org > http://lists.linuxtogo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-core -- Martin 'JaMa' Jansa jabber: martin.ja...@gmail.com
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