Forget The Zaurus - Itś Fujitsu Time!

[zmiq2]

well,

- on my gnome desktop right now, I go to applications-settings-gnome controls center-font, and there I can choose application font, desktop font, window title font and terminal font

- other programs let you select its own program font

- as gnome-themes, I can also see some liek 'large text and icons',

- in firefox - preferences you can also select font for different text placements,

I think it's doable, but I agree that maybe a general setting to just zoom everything would make things easier

[desertrat]

For (2), I know of NO modern operating system where you can change the onscreen resolution (i.e. you can tell the system I have x pixels per inch, please draw things accordingly). It is NOT just the font, but the size of the menubar, buttons, and all UI elements. There is some talk of resolution independence in Leopard, to some degree. I can see NO controls in Vista or Linux to tell the whole system of the dpi resolution.

Vista is new, not modern

I'm not sure a DPI setting will be all that useful because you can fine tune all the gui elements using styles/themes:

In KDE you can easily change the font sizes used, you can change the styles which makes the sizes of the various gui elements like slider bars, buttons etc, larger or smaller.

I don't know about Vista but even Win98 allowed you to change various aspects of the gui (font size, icon size, title bar size etc) and have them incorporated into themes.

[Da_Blitz]

playing with font sizes or font colors is always bad under windows, i used to have an inverse theme where the greay was black and the black was red (ie text and such) but there are so many apps out there that hard code the colors instead of using somthing like the predefined toobar color

i assum linux is the same to some degree (never tried) however at least i can submit a patch

actually linux may have it better as most of the theme and coloring stuff is handeled by the WM and theme egine as far as i can tell

one thing i would love to see is compositing support on more platforms, even those without 3d, waht that means is that when you uncover a window (from having somthing on top of it) it just majically displays it instead of getting the app to redraw it, i ma be misinformed but i dont belive X does this out of the box as it generally needs more ram (ie you have to give each app an area in mem to draw its entire  screen and you cut an passte them together to display the screen, moving one app means the compositor jdoes all teh work and the apps dont need to redraw)

reason i bring that up is byrel has that nice zoom feature and "invert colors on screen" which would be nice for these things, the inversion is great for apps at night (i have had problems with gpsdrive and its "inverse mode" and zoom wolud be handy on such a small screen, in fact if i could just use the screen keyboard on the kohjinsha as the area to look at movement thingy then it would be perfect with zoom

now if i could just work out how to get those 2 features without byrel/compiz i would be fine.

[ralphrmartin]

have a look at project lookingglass

It's just that, a project, not the underpinning of a current operating system.

I'm not saying this sort of thing is not possible. I am just saying that current OSes do not fully support resolution independence. And until they do, too many pixels on a small screen becomes illegible. I was seriously thinking of buying a Sony Vaio to replace my Zaurus until I tried it and found it to be completely unusable because the user interface was unreadable.

[Da_Blitz]

i thought ciaro was suposed to help some of that by moving away from pixels and going to dpi as well as vector graphics (thats what i got out of it)

as far as i can tell the only things on PCs that have display independence is websites where the designers are not too "hands on" anything with well structured data seems to flow well

[zmiq2]

But for the browser design, if using firefox, there are a lot of extension and/or greasemonkey scripts to actually adapt any lazy-windows-1900x1600 designed website to render properly n your environment.

As always, it's not an easy task but doable.

[Da_Blitz]

as always YMMV right

actually i was talking about sites designed for 800x600 on smaller screens (like the Z) as it seems sites designed for 1024 are becomming more common

the worst would have to be the heavy ad loaded news sites

[Antikx]

the worst would have to be the heavy ad loaded news sites
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A custom hosts file really helps with those sites.
(not with the layout, but the amount of crap on the screen)

[speculatrix]

In KDE you can easily change the font sizes used, you can change the styles which makes the sizes of the various gui elements like slider bars, buttons etc, larger or smaller.
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yup, in KDE you can set the sizes of icons in the start menu (in windows you have two choices).. in fact, you can tune almost everything, but not all options are trivially available, probably because it'd be overwhelming.

this Fujitsu with v high res means you'd have beautiful smooth screen fonts , less need for anti-aliassing, very detailed photos etc.

[speculatrix]

found a video showing the swivel
http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/200...su_umpc_vi.html

[tml]

I wonder why they never show the keyboard. From what I can see it looks like a grid layout with square-shaped keys. Otherwise, from comparison with the hands, the form factor looks good to me. It's a pity none of these devices makes it to Europe.

[Ling]

Max,

I have had mine a few days now. Pocketsize isn't much good if you can't do what you need to do. I now have a useful device rather than one I HAD to constantly tinker with and never got quite right. If you must put it in your pocket, this isn't it. Good luck.
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You mean you have one of these fujitsus? Are they for sale? More info, please.
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No, I think there has been some editing of the original post. When I responded to it, it was referencing the Libretto U100. Otherwise, I really need to have a talk with my crack dealer because he is giving me some bad stuff. I imagine that the model listed now costs about as much as my car. Didn't mean to get Meanie upset, so I will just shut up now.

[gr8ful]

Here's more information and a mini review of the Fujitsu for those who have been waiting for more details on this potential Zaurus replacement.


http://www.umpcportal.com/modules/news/art...php?storyid=592


Be sure to check out the link to the hands-on report by PC World.

[ZDevil]

In terms of form factors, this beast is literally the evolved (mutated) version of Zaurus!
Given the hardware, it is questionable about its performance running XP, perhaps forget about Vista ...

But having it run *nix will be super cool!

More links:

Fujitsu official site:
http://www.fmworld.net/biz/fmv/product/hard/blb0704/u8240/

Mobile Daily News Blog (in japanese):
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/yamadaatmn/20070516/1179320510

[speculatrix]

If the device could be fitted with a flash SSD and underclocked, it'd probably have a formidable battery life... I agree it looks like a mutant ninja hero zaurus that escaped from Sharp's lab.