Introducing penguinphone
 

Hello there TMO,

I have started writing a replacement user interface for what Maemo ships with on the N900. It runs completely without Maemo, on a normal Debian (debian900) installation. Fully open source (GPLv3) and compatible with standard Linux software, that every Linux distribution has packaged.

I call it penguinphone, and right now, it can display an application launcher, a task switcher and a status bar with a close button, completely efficient in C. You can even test it on your normal desktop Linux by running a X server inside your normal X server.

While that doesn't sound like much, it is just what I needed to start with the interesting applications, that will handle SMS and phone calls. It will take some time, until there's something to show-off again from my side, so that's why I made a cut and released what I have got so far. Maybe someone else might find this interesting and play around with it, and also I'm curious what you guys think about it and if there's still something left of the N900 community :D

I've written down a lot in the GitHub README.md, and taken a few screenshots, so go check them out if you like:

• Screenshots
• Source code and installation instructions
• Blog post

https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/...511ccc71ce.jpg

Re: Introducing penguinphone
 

Excellent work! I'm very pleased to see projects like this that make use of my Debian installation scripts.

I played around with a few tiling window managers on the N900 under Debian some time ago. i3 was one of the ones that impressed me the most so I'm really looking forward to trying this out when I get some spare time.

Re: Introducing penguinphone
 

Wouldn't i3 be making windows smaller and smaller? (unless you use the windowed mode)

Re: Introducing penguinphone
 

I use the tabbed mode, so all windows are tabbed. With the font size set to zero, the tab bar is so small, that it hardly takes up any space, but can be used with a stylus. With your fingers, you can use the program switcher bundled with penguinphone ("alttab", click on the top right icon on the statusbar) to switch tasks.

Works well for me :)


EDIT:
https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/...d0e12f4ce5.jpg

Here are two programs open + the task switcher. You can see the tab bar below the status bar (the blue tab is open).

Re: Introducing penguinphone
 

any idea if this could be the OS for Neo900?

Re: Introducing penguinphone
 

From the Neo900 FAQ:
...so there will be no official OS, if that was your question.

Penguinphone is not an own distribution right now anyway, but what is there yet can of course be used on the Neo900, too :)