Re: Gentoo and fvwm on hx4700

Hi,

It's great! I want to try it!

Is there a guide about building Gentoo for ipaq?

Thx,

Sza2

kmeaw wrote:
> Hello, hx4700 subscribers!
>
> I would like to share my impressions with you. Recently I have installed
> Gentoo GNU/Linux distribution on my PDA. After spending some days on
> hacking it, I got a nearly usable environment.
>
> I have taken some screenshots to make easier the process of telling you,
> how everything works. Here they are: http://kmeaw.com/ipaq-gentoo
> All images are clickable, so just click it to zoom.
> Sorry, but I was cheating: screen shots are taken not from the real
> device (hx4700), but from Xoo nested X-server, running on my desktop
> computer. But it won't matter, the look and feel of the environment are
> identical.
>
> Let me tell you about the software. I am running glibc 2.6, gcc 4.1.2,
> xorg-server 1.3.0, kernel 2.6.21-hh13, fvwm 2.5.21.
>
> I hope my host is reachable at the moment you are reading this
> paragraph, so here is the description of the screen shots:
>
> When system boot sequence has been completed, Fig.1 is displayed on the
> screen. It consists of four parts: the top bar, category menu, launch
> buttons and the bottom bar. The top bar allows you to switch between
> windows, close (left button), move and maximize them (buttons on the
> right). Category menu allows applications to be split into categories,
> so you won't have the entire screen filled up with lots of icons.
> However, there is one special category ("All"), which contains all
> applications. Launch buttons, as you have guessed, launch applications,
> when you tap them. Switching the category changes launch buttons, that
> are displayed on the screen. The bottom bar has "home" button (minimize
> all windows), clock applet, APM status button (displays the output of
> "apm" command on the screen), backlight toggle button, sound volume
> applet, network menu and bluetooth menu. On the right you can see
> "toggle on-screen keyboard" button.
>
> Fig.2 shows you the category menu unfolded.
>
> Lets open some applications. On fig.3, I have opened gVim and toggled
> the on-screen keyboard. As you can see, window switcher now contains a
> single window ("buttons (~/.ipaq) - GVIM"), which is active (blue
> background). It looks like a titlebar :)
>
> Linux supports multitasking. Let us use it and run multiple applications
> at the same time. I have also launched ROX-Filer (a file manager). Fig.4
> shows you, how multiple windows are shown on the window switcher.
>
> Unlike GPE window manager (matchbox), fvwm allows you to move and resize
> windows (however, windows are maximized by default, so only one window
> is displayed and it fills the entire screen). Tap the right button
> (Maximize) in the top bar to un-maximize (restore) a window. Then tap
> the adjacent button (Move) and move a window with a stylus.
>
> iPAQ hx4700 has a wireless network interface, so let's have a
> user-friendly way to use it. Tap the "network" icon on the bottom bar,
> and a network menu will appear (Fig.6). If the wireless is disabled, it
> will contain only one item - "(enable)". Choose it, and wireless will be
> enabled (Wireless LED will be glowing). Tap the "network" icon again,
> and the menu will contain all access points (and their quality levels),
> that the wireless scanner has just found. Also the menu contains one
> special item - "disable", that will turn the radio off.
>
> But most access points require authentication to be secure. So there
> should be a way to request an encryption key from the user. After
> selecting a protected access point (shown with "[protected]" label), a
> dialog will appear. Enter your encryption key and press "OK". It will be
> saved, so next time you won't have to enter it (just press "OK").
>
> Fig.8 shows "ps" output. As you can see, FVWM does not consume much
> resources. I have done some performance tweaks to make things faster.
> When you start the system, a urxvtd daemon will be running, so opening a
> terminal window will just communicate already running process and ask it
> to create one more window. An on-screen keyboard is always running, the
> "toggle on-screen keyboard" button just shows/hides it without actually
> loading/unloading the xkbd process. /usr/share/applications/*.desktop
> files icons and categories menu are pre-calculated on the environment
> startup, so there are no large directory rescans.
>
> Currently, my installation on Gentoo consumes 785Mb on my storage card.
> You can see installed package list at http://kmeaw.com/pkglist
>
> If you want to try running the fvwm environment on your desktop computer
> to see, how it looks and feels, download
> http://kmeaw.com/xoo-ipaq.tar.bz2 file, unpack hidden directory .ipaq
> into your $HOME and copy files from xoo folder into /usr/share/xoo (you
> need to have Xoo ( http://projects.o-hand.com/xoo ) and xkbd (
> http://handhelds.org/~mallum/xkbd/ ) installed). Then run xoo --device
> ipaq4700 & sleep 2; DISPLAY=:1 FVWM_USERDIR=$HOME/.ipaq fvwm2
>
> Feel free to contact me by Jabber (JID is the same as my e-mail address)
> if you have any problems, questions or comments.
>
> Thanks to Shvetsov Alexey V. (alexxyum, the maintainer of "pda" portage
> overlay) and Gentoo Portage package maintainers. Also thanks to
> everyone, who have just read this message. I hope you have been
> interested and will try it on your PDA :)
>
> --
> kmeaw
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>
Received on Tue Jul 31 2007 - 05:50:43 EDT