Looking to get a piece of the growing market for mobile services in China, a Chinese Linux developer has released an open-source alternative to smart-phone software from Microsoft and Symbian. China MobileSoft Ltd. (CMS) built its mLinux for Smart Phones software around its mLinux kernel, which is derived from a Linux kernel developed by Red Hat Inc., said Liu Bing, business manager at CMS at the CeBIT Asia show on Monday. The mLinux kernel requires 200K bytes of memory and can be used in 3G (third-generation) mobile handsets, he said.
Linux Ready for Smart Phones
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Symbian already got the support from the major players in the cellphone scene, Palm OS and PocketPC Phone Ed. got the support from the PDA scene. There is market left for Linux? Maybe in China, but that developer doesn’t have any Chinese major players in China….
Oh well 🙂
Symbian already got the support from the major players in the cellphone scene, Palm OS and PocketPC Phone Ed. got the support from the PDA scene. There is market left for Linux? Maybe in China, but that developer doesn’t have any Chinese major players in China….
Oh well 🙂
I wonder what GUI they decided on for this.. I don’t see it in the article. Would have been a great place to use PicoGUI
I think this is the GUI they’re using:
http://www.mobilesoft.com.cn/product/product_01product_02_en.htm
Doesn’t give much information, including whether it’s completely original or derived from some open source GUI. They mention Windows API.. maybe it’s based on Microwindows?
I’ve tried Microwindows/NanoX and it is quite fast. Anybody have comment on this GUI system? Looking at the acceptance, not so many interested with it so maybe somebody can give the reason.
I’ve noticed this too.. I think the reason Microwindows seems to be losing popularity is that it is just a partial reimplementation of the X and Win32 APIs, without any novel features except efficiency. Due to moore’s law, if people just want X they’ll use X. There hasn’t been much demand for a Win32-like API on Linux.
If you don’t want X, there are other GUIs, like Qtopia and PicoGUI you can choose from
I know that you are the core man for PicoGUI but sorry to say that I think the same goes to PicoGUI. Not so many get interested to it especially to develop a real usable application.
I did tried to help by starting RunningPicoGUI section in the PicoWiki but my time very limited to explore PicoGUI further. It look like no others interested to improve the section except you.
For Qtopia I think the Free Software mentality look to influence it a bit since it is under Trolltech. Well until now there are still many that cannot accept KDE due to it relationship with Trolltech Qt.
I didn’t write PicoGUI expecting everybody to start writing software for it. Qtopia’s huge strength over the other embedded GUIs that work with linux is that it leverages the huge base of software already written in Qt.
I wrote PicoGUI because I find it useful myself, and I wanted to experiment with an architecture that, as far as I know, nobody’s tried in quite this way yet.
Right now people are using PicoGUI in real commercial applications. They are specialized apps, so the lack of a large software base isn’t a problem. I know it will be a long time before PicoGUI is usable on a PDA platform in the same sense that Qtopia is, but the fact that one GUI is more popular doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be others. IT’s the same deal with operating systems.
As far as the actual depth of the PicoGUI community goes.. there are usually around 15 people in our IRC channel, and about a half dozen people that frequently write code for PicoGUI. I’m the only one that knows pgserver inside and out, but that’s because I haven’t had time to document it. As in most projects, there’s a lot more code than documentation. PicoGUI does work right now, and you can run real apps on it.. just not many have been written.
I suppose I could also mention that one company, RidgeRun, was working on a PicoGUI-based environment for cell-phones. It had the potential to be a really nifty product, but due to some management mistakes that weren’t even explained to the employees well, the company ceased operations before releasing their product.
Well I’m hoping to see that somebody will try to develop a desktop system base on it. For me ,I can’t do it due to my very limited time (This is one area that I salute all of you OSS programmer, you can brilliantly allocate your time in extra to your daily job, which until now I can’t)
It would be cool to see a desktop system with an architecture like PicoGUI’s… though right now there are some big roadblocks for that:
– PicoGUI needs more applications
– Need more choices for window management, for example ion-style or fully overlapping
– PicoGUI’s rendering engine isn’t designed to handle overlapping windows, but there are existing backends that could handle this very well: DirectFB and OpenGL.
I would love to have a desktop with picogui’s widget and theme model, and OpenGL acceleration everywhere. PicoGUI’s sdlgl driver can do a lot of this already, but it needs a lot of tweaking to be usable.
Still, it’s a goal