Re: [linuxiran] Familiar/OPIE/GPE2 Sync

[Hossein S. Zadeh]

On Mon, 2003-05-12 at 16:32, Aryan Ameri wrote:
> On Monday 12 May 2003 08:39, Hossein S. Zadeh wrote:
> 

> You point out that OPIE is not X, well really is X for the embeded 
> stuff? Look at it's design, network transparancy all over, and many 
> other stuff that are rarely needed for the desktop, and I guess never 
> nedded for the embeded market. Face it, X was designed for a 
> Server/Terminal enviroment, it has been hacked to heck, but 
> (Okay  I am wearing my underwear, and I am expecting to get flamed)
> X is inefficent, with today's standards. It is the most inefficent part 
> of GNU/Linux. 
> 
> Now you mention this GPE2, I never even thought that it would be posible 
> to run X on embeded devices. But aside from OPIE and GPE2, have you 
> looked at Qtopia? It is a product from TrollTech (maker of the Qt 
> toolkit) and it comes on Zaurus by default. As Zaurus also uses a 
> StrongARM processor like iPAQ, It would be interesting to give it also 
> a try. 
> 
> When Zaurus came out, people complained that it doesn't have X, when Mac 
> OS X came out, people complained that (by default) it doesn't have X, 
> but maybe there is a good reason that these don't have X.


Hi there,
OPIE is an off-shoot of Qtopia. TrollTech designed Qtopia. They sell it
as a commercial product. They also released a limited, but free,
version. This is when OPIE comes in. OPIE team got the free version of
Qtopia and added/polished it so much that it is now more mature, more
polished, and more feature-rich than Qtopia.

OPIE and Qtopia are not X. They have their own infrastructure and their
own API. This brings me to your other point. Not having X is good in
that you don't have top carry all of X crap/hack. It also has the
disadvantage that some of the nice X features are missing, you know,
things like network transparency. For example, if I want to load up a
huge spread sheet, I can SSH/Telnet to a server, and run it from there.
With OPIE/Qtopia, you cannot do that.

All of that said, I run OPIE on my iPAQ at the moment.

cheers,
Hossein