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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Member since:2006-02-15
For a simple embedded device, there's no reason to have a gui.
The overwhelming majority of embedded devices don't have any UI. That's part of what "embedded" meant before the market-droids got their claws into the term.
Member since:2005-08-19
Um, dude, given that this is a user experience platform, we're kind of assuming a requirement for a GUI... That's the entire point of the GNOME Mobile Platform. Sure, you're unlikely to need a GUI in your industrial refrigeration system... So you're not going to be looking in our direction anyway.
Member since:2005-12-31
> For a simple embedded device, there's no reason to
> have more than 32MB RAM for the GNOME Mobile
> Platform, X and your application.
Umm... 32MB of RAM is a *LOT* for an embedded device. A simple embedded device - even one that needs a GUI - is still far below that.
Also, I consider X and GNOME to be overkill for embedded stuff, let alone for *simple* embedded stuff. The whole concept of a window manager, or a network-abstracted GUI, don't make a lot of sense for embedded devices (special cases aside). I'd rather invest some effort into a device-specific GUI than port something that is encumbered by features I don't need.
Member since:2006-01-03
You don't need a window manager at all to deliver a gtk+ app. And X is not large when the cruft is removed (limited fonts, single driver, etc.). I believe you can even put gtk+ directly on the framebuffer, but I'm not sure it is that advantageous.
Overkill? If you need wifi, tcpip, video and sound, and a graphic user interface with limited resources, you cannot do much better than choosing linux+gstreamer+gtk.
If it is overkill for your app, rest assured that the police won't come to arrest you if you use something else. Surely there are simpler embedded GUIs for embedded devices, but they all tend look like shit and offer far less functionality (think of most cameras or mobile phones), so they are not quite in the same league. Plus, they are usually proprietary and very expensive, and you have to do a lot of work to implement them in your hardware.
For those apps that can afford it, it may be the best choice, and it keeps getting better all the time (memory reductions, non-FP optimizations, library consolidation etc). Qt is also there, of course, so you have other similar choices.
Member since:
2005-08-19
The GNOME Platform is very modular, that's one of the reasons it's such a popular choice for embedded work. For a simple embedded device, there's no reason to have more than 32MB RAM for the GNOME Mobile Platform, X and your application. All of the optimisation and performance work happening in the embedded space is improving GNOME for your PC! :-)