Honestly, what else do you do with your SIMpad except surfing the net?

The problem is, we never had a really good webbrowser on the SIMpad. Not with WinCE, not with familiar GPE and OPIE, and now not really with Angstrom as well.

The only "nearly" usable browser is Minimo, and that's what I am using for a while now since familiar. Minimo never was really stable, it's crashing X11 due to a memory leak, if a webpage contains too many or too large images. Strangely, Minimo seemed to work better on familiar, than on Angstrom, although it's quite faster with Angstrom now.

I know, that there is not enough memory on a SIMpad, but would it be somehow possible to get Firefox into a standard size Angstrom SIMpad Image, and to run it with the standard size of RAM?

Any other alternative approach, like Angstrom with OPIE and a recent Konqueror Embedded version?

Anything to come has to be better than GPE + Mimimo, and my dream would be, to be able to use my SIMpad purely for surfing the net incl. Flash support...

Epiphany is pretty good, but I don't think it has flash, or that it builds under OE.

Epiphany would do as well, although I don't think it going to make a lot of a difference to Firefox, since it uses the same libraries (just another frontend to xulrunner). But it still has to build and run on a SIMpad, and of course somebody would have to provide and support it...

Sorry, Epiphany-Webkit, which uses the faster and lighter (but slightly buggier) Webkit rendering engine.

Whatever is possible. But it should be clear, that something has to be done, because the right now the websurfing experience with a SIMpad is not satisfying at all.

Anybody here playing around with building custom images, or creating new packages?

Building custom images isn't hard at all. All you need to do is set up OE, then tweak an image config file (easier than it sounds). New/updated packages are being added all the time.

I'm out of the OE business now, though.

I use the simpad for playing scummvm games. It is a perfect device for that purpose . I am also using it at university as a X11 terminal client. So I am able to surf with a fully powered firefox and can display pdfs etc.



I don't think so. Firefox requires too much ram/space (mrdata has a running firefox on his device with 128 mb ram and mmc card mod). A better solution would be a webkit based browser. But also such a browser needs much space/ram.



Unfortunately opie is quite old and using a very old version of qt which makes it hard to port a recent konqueror embedded version to opie.



Well getting flash support is quite hard. You will have to use gnash or swfdec because the official flash player is closed source and not available for angstrom (afaik).
Probably a browser combined with DirectFB would be a solution. But I think it will be a lot of work and the result is unclear.
Best thing would be to discuss this on the angstrom list. Because there are maybe other device owners with different devices which share the same wish.
An official image is always cooler than an unofficial .
I also maybe can help you a bit.

best regards
mr nice

Can you explain this in more details, how to use the SIMpadd as a X11 terminal client?

Seems to be the best idea, if you can not get a fully featured webbrowser onto a SIMpad.

Try looking at VNC or SSH with X forwarding (the better option). One of those is probably what he's doing.

I don't really have any mentionable experience with VNC and X forwarding, that's why I would like to know, how this is going to work on a SIMpad exactly. I would like to connect to a server through a SSH tunnel, and it should support session-resume, which most likely will limit me to VNC (I do not assume, we have something like FreeNX for the SIMpad, do we?).

Is the SIMpad with recent Angstrom image fast enough to support a 800x600 VNC session through SSH?

Which packages are needed additionally to a fresh Angstrom image?

Is there a pure point & click approach (doesn't help, if you have to do anything in a terminal to start the VNC session)?

Well, VNC alone isn't really a good thing to do (unencrypted), so you kind of want/need SSH in there.

If your server has a static IP or a way to easily find the IP, you could just make a script that you could launch to connect to the server.

If you just want to use Firefox through SSH, you don't need a whole VNC session, just X forwarding through SSH.

Hope that helps.