The GNOME Foundation announced today the GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative (GMAE) today at the Embedded Linux Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. The initiative is aimed at bolstering GNOME usage as an embedded and mobile development platform. The initiative has been in development since last year, says GNOME Foundation board member Jeff Waugh. The platform will be distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). In the next 12 months the group plans to add a mobile email framework called Tinymail, the GeoClue geolocation service, Java Mobile & Embedded (Java ME), PulseAudio audio management, and the HAL hardware information system.
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It's certainly feasible: we're doing it in the ACCESS Linux Platform, Nokia's doing it in the N770 and N800, Vernier's doing it on their data acquisition device...
I'd also mentioned to Zonker--and this point didn't come out strongly enough in an otherwise-excellent article--that the upshot of our discussion around GTK+ (and particularly, Cairo) performance was that the developers reworked the code significantly to offer another approach for systems without hardware floating-point support, a change which went in around v2.16 of GTK, I think. So GMAE has had positive, measurable impact, in the code, even before we officially announced our existence. Like I keep saying, we're all about the code.
Matt Allum of OpenedHand presented on "X (Without a Desktop)" yesterday as well, and mentioned that they've gotten a whole X stack (fonts not included) into 1 meg of RAM.
We're planning on getting more "mobile-relevant" additions, adaptations and applications, even, included in the GNOME v2.20 release, coming this September. And, as jdub correctly pointed out at the announcement, we're not talking about a "toy version of GNOME" in this context, we're talking a full-on stack, potentially--although it's noteworthy that the stack is quite modular, and it's possible to pick and choose the pieces you need.
I don't expect, for example, that anyone's going to run the GNOME desktop itself on a cellphone or media player. But the user interface on those devices can still take advantage of the goodness of GTK+, Gstreamer, etc.
(They're aren't, by the way, any "Linux-based Nokia phones" that I know of, just the web tablets. All the phones run Symbian.)
Member since:2006-02-15
I've done it on a Zaurus just to prove it could be done. Reminded me of the dancing bear, only a lot slower.
You haven't lived until you've brought FireFox up on a QVGA screen.
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2007-04-17
Is it a feasible idea? The GTK+ toolkit is pretty taxing on system resources, and I quote from the article:
Schlesinger says that there were some issues with adoption of current versions of the GTK+ toolkit due to performance problems with Cairo on machines without floating point processors, such as the ARM processor.
Although if they can overcome this, then it would be a really nice platform to see, especially if you could use it on the Linux-based Nokia phones.
Edited 2007-04-19 20:55