maemo.org - Talk - View Single Post - Alternative desktop for N900

Wikiwide	2010-07-03 , 00:14
Posts: 2,006 \| Thanked: 3,351 times \| Joined on Jun 2010 @ N900: Battery low. N950: torx 4 re-used once and fine; SIM port torn apart	#29

Originally Posted by radiochickenwax

Hi.
This is my first post here. I too have an n900, and would prefer to run fluxbox instead of Hildon.

I would be glad, too : )

Originally Posted by radiochickenwax

I feel that Hildon is part of what is keeping my n900 from running as a true computer.

File manager is too limited, Sketch can neither resize nor zoom image, Photographs' editor saves edited png into jpg, etc... Too much eye-candy and not enough functionality. I use Fennec to see the files which aren't seen by File Manager, and vi to edit them if needed.

Originally Posted by radiochickenwax

I have fluxbox running in the easy-debian chroot, but this seems redundant and needlessly resource intensive.

I'm of the same opinion. :-)

Originally Posted by radiochickenwax

I suppose ideally, I would abandon Maemo altogether and simply run debian natively, with FSO as a means of accessing GSM telephony, and probably zhone as an interface as in the following link.

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Debian

However, this does not seem to be trivial to install at present, so I am stuck with Maemo.

Yes, to run Debian natively you need:
1. to make a backup;
2. to find a Debian image for your type of hardware, or to make it yourself;
3. put this image onto a memory card or something like that and follow instructions from Debian repository;
4. If N900 doesn't work, reflash it and start again.

Originally Posted by radiochickenwax

However, I would like to at least abandon Hildon, and surprisingly this is the only thread that I've found so far. I would have thought that by now someone would have found a way to replace the default window manager.

Penguinbait could, but he doesn't have N900.

http://tablethacker.com/

Originally Posted by radiochickenwax

I don't like Hildon because it forces every window to be maximized, which nullifies the concept of multitasking in many ways. I can't view two windows simultaneously, and I can't resize them or move them.

It's due to window manager, Matchbox. It's mostly used for devices with such small screens that there is no point in having two windows opened simultaneously. However, N900 has quite large screen, so yes, for multitasking matchbox isn't the best choice.

Originally Posted by radiochickenwax

For me, open source is largely about the freedom of choice; choosing a window manager is kind of a big deal, and I've always sided with fluxbox for it's minimalism and flexibility. So where is the first step to take? There is no .xinitrc in Maemo, so what starts Xorg? I'm thinking it might be somewhere in /etc/init.d, but I would appreciate any advice.

Yes, I suppose that on start-up everything is called from /etc/init.d. At the same time, the scripts in /etc/init.d call out other scripts from /etc/osso-af-init and binaries from /usr/bin. Right now I suppose that Hildon is started in /etc/init.d/hildon-desktop. Before editing it, backup everything from N900, so that you can re-flash it in case of problems.

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