Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

Do you plan to keep hildon-desktop (making it Wayland compositor) or move to something else? The problem is that Weston, while being a reference compositor, is more like a Wayland demo and not very useful, while desktop environments like GNOME/KDE have their own compositors (Mutter/KWin). There are also some other compositors which could be used as base, such as sway (they also implement WIP library - https://github.com/SirCmpwn/wlroots) or lipstick (UI is written in QML, used in SailfishOS/Nemo Mobile).

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

At the moment I'm just trying out ideas. I did think about extending the Weston desktop shell. I have also looked at how budgie was interacting with mutter. As mentioned elsewhere I think the easiest option at the moment is to use fmg's Fremantle-GTK2 and create a GTK3 library to enable some preliminary transition work, with just enough content to make apps fit in. Long term a decision/opinion of community would determine Wayland path. I'm just providing results of experiments at the moment.

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

Initial announcement of the pre-alpha images can be found here: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=100192

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

What's your vision of browser support on the ported Fremantle? microb is unusably outdated and closed-source.

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

As it is a debian based system, you should be able to run all current opensource browsers.

E.g.
Chromium & Firefox, which may be to much for the little RAM
but also Dillo, Konqueror and others which will allow you to access current websites.

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

I have some Serial UART IC could this be used for the N900 kernel development?
When this will do the job I have a spare one and would give it to someone of the fremantle porting team for free or somebody else if he is willing to do kernel development for the N900.

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

I could do the same on the N900. The main problem was that the UI was unusable. Many application can be used without UI rewrite. A browser app is not one of them, at least not the ones I tried on N900.

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

Did not give a lot of thought, but enough to realise that it might indeed be a problem.

One idea is to use a custom version of surf [1] and ensure that scrolling and such works the way we want it to.

Another option is to do some crazy fudge on the touchscreen input and emulate both right click and scroll. (Hold <1s; left click, hold <2s; right; hold <3; enter "scroll mode")

We'll have to see how it's done in osso-xterm and the older browser, I guess. Probably someone already knows.

[1] https://surf.suckless.org/

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

Might be useful - not for me personally, kernel is stable enough I don't need a serial to test small changes. But maybe for someone else it might be. See also: http://n900.elektranox.org/serial-adapter.html

Re: Fremantle porting - getting organised
 

The problem is that modern websites use features that require a web browser of memory usage that exceeds the 256MB of RAM of the N900. Your choices here are simple:

• Use a modern web browser which doesn't support JavaScript (Dillo, Lynx, etc.) and accept that many websites won't work.
• Continue to use MicroB which has no HTML5 support, old ECMAScript support, old Flash support and accept that many websites won't work.
• Use a modern lightweight browser from Devuan like Midori or Surf which is more feature complete than MicroB and accept that it will run slowly on the N900. Nevertheless it is way more useable than Firefox or Chromium.
• Run Firefox or Chromium on a server and connect to that from your N900 via VNC.
• Forget about your N900 and run Maemo Leste on a device with more RAM.

Don't think you are ever going to get anything better on the N900.