maemo.org - Talk - alternate window manager (n900 specific)

Quote:

Originally Posted by radiochickenwax (Post 745727)

Hi,

Let me begin by stating that I've had my n900 for less than a month, and I know there's lots of hate going on around here towards people who want to drastically change things, so please don't spam me with reasons why I should use android or buy an iphone. I've used both and I like neither. So far, the n900 is the closest thing I can find to what I want in an phone/OS (apart from making my own which I have neither time nor money nor equipment to do).

I've been a Zaurus user since 2003 or so, and I've been running debian natively for the past three years or so, and would like to replicate as much of this behavior as possible with the n900 while keeping phone functionality. (Which AFAICS is not possible in debian yet).

I've been quite frustrated by the default n900 Xorg setup. Oftentimes, I don't want every window to be maximized. This is one of the main reasons that keep me using easy-debian in a chroot, but this has many problems too, and I don't wish to discuss it here.

One major benefit from doing this is that I am only consuming a small fraction of the memory taken up by the hildon-desktop system, and I am also able to interact with multiple windows simultaneously (gimp is a good example).

What I have done so far is try to replace the matchbox-window-manager and hildon-desktop with a lighter weight system, and so far I've discussed this in the following thread.

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=56506 (Alternative desktop for N900)

However, there does not seem to be much enthusiasm there, and I'm getting a little off topic from that thread so I decided to start a new one.

What I want from Xorg seems to have already been done for the n8xx series; on diablo, they can run XFCE, KDE, fluxbox, etc et. al, but this does not translate into the n900/fremantle world yet, as there are no alternatives to matchbox/hildon that I'm aware of without changing the OS completely, and/or breaking the phone GSM system.

The following thread:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=43188 (Debian Etch, Rebuilt: 6,451 .debs for Maemo 5)
is the closest thing I've found so far to a repository that hosts alternate window managers, and I've only been able to get one window manager working from here (blackbox). http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net/

Using the methods in the following thread,
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=34412 (On-device development in C/C++?)
I've also been able to build the fluxbox window manager (http://fluxbox.org/) which is the most ideal for me, but have not been able to package it, or even make it run properly.

So for now, I am still trying to make blackbox my default window manager, and here are some major problems I'm encountering:

1.) (solved) The phone can receive calls on boot, but the hildon-status menu does not load completely across the screen, and bringing up the dialing pad is difficult.

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_Sj-9sPVZQhM/TD...6/IMG_1772.JPG

2.) (solved) I cannot connect to any kind of internet when hildon-desktop is not running.

http://lh5.ggpht.com/_Sj-9sPVZQhM/TD...6/IMG_1773.JPG

When opening the internet dialog from hildon-status-menu (as shown in the image above), the maemo menu does not load from the bottom. Presumably because hildon-desktop is not running.

Here is a video demonstrating what I'm saying.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2j_IqF8IV8

I need to find a way to fill the gap left by hildon-desktop. I have tried the methods listed at the following link:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Phone_control
to bring up the GSM or wifi internet, and have had no avail thus far. Querying

Code:

/etc/init.d/dbus status

claims that dbus is not started.

Code:

/etc/init.d/dbus start

claims that dbus is already started.

Any help would be appreciated, any hatred would not be.
Thanks.

Ive followed yours and wikiwides posts in that other thread and was able to boot with hildon desktop+blackbox (since i didnt disable hildon-desktop) however as i didnt set blackbox theme or bbkeys it was pretty unusable since this is my daily phone im not testing it that often. Also how did you solvethose problems you posted in first post? also how can i boot into terminal? (ive searched but i just cant find it), if op or anybody else have info then please post here. I think you should definetly document this in wiki or this thread as this was the only alternate wm thread for n900 i could find.