Thread: Big-time Rant of the N800
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coffeedrinker is offline coffeedrinker
2008-01-08 , 17:32
Posts: 168 | Thanked: 51 times | Joined on Jun 2007
#113
Originally Posted by petergunn View Post
2) Scratchbox + Matchbox - OMG amazing!! I have never seen such a marvelously useless combination of geeky technology. It takes hours to install and gigabytes of disk space, or a huge VM download and either allow vmware to take over your system or use qemu and flaky cut'n paste. Apps can be built from source and because Maemo is debian like it only takes a moderate amount of frustration to get things to compile - woohoo! erm.. well then there is the issue that there really aren't any Linux apps that work out the box with Matchbox or Hildon input and beyond a handful like microb, xournal (still havent got it to install), and maemo mapper and you probably wouldnt want the others anyway. Seriously gigabytes of system scripts, headers, libraries? What are you thinking Nokia? You need a simplified dev environment that runs on the n8x00 and lets people build useful apps. Geez - I get at least Flash is an option now. Processor not powerful enough, not enough RAM for gcc, not enough storage? I dont think so.
This addresses my greatest frustration with the tablet, and I mentioned it in the x86 v. ARM thread. The development environment is a hassle, so much so that I haven't even bothered to set it up for the 2008 OS.

Under 2007 I had my tablet running with fvwm and could launch and run any of the apps on the tablet with multiple 'windows.' I could simply move between them to access various apps. I also was able to port any x11 program to my system without 'Hildonizing' it.

However, two things were a problem.

The first was that the web browser does not run like any of the other apps and would not run properly in another window manager AND no other suitable web browser could be ported to the n800.

The second problem, and far more frustrating to me, was the fact that Nokia released the source code for the system under the GPL but IT WAS CORRUPTED AND WAS UNCOMPILABLE. I mentioned this in the developers thread. The modified the window code in order to make sure no pop up windows were blocking, but that caused problems with menus under different window managers.

The n800 is a great little pocket computer, but it is most limited to me because of these issues.