A few people have bring what they wanted on the Zaurus (debian, BSD, Gentoo, X11/desktop, Qtopia, ...) and apparently they don't need more.
The others are waiting for the Messiah and will always complain about lack of time. They don't know how to invest themselves into what they would like to see next and most of them don't want to.
You are right. But as I wrote above, I already decided to start to work towards what I want myself. Simply for myself. Otherwise, the whole Zaurus idea is useles for me (why should I own a PDA-like device when I cannot use it as a PDA?). I simply will try to make what I want reality. When I will be finished, you will certainly hear about it. If I will fail, probably you won't . In short, what I want at the beginning, is to create a configuration/customization of pdaXrom in which:
1.- I can work as with a laptop - that is already done, mostly by Meanie, and works almost perfectly (thanks for that work!), and
2.- I can work as with PDA when I turn the display - this is missing and I will try to add it to Meanie's customization.
That means at the beginning something in the following direction:
1.- Desktop with navigation similar to what matchbox-desktop does, i.e. the whole menu on the desktop. That's very useful.
2.- Icons which can be pinned to the desktop
3.- configure WM so, that I do not have to move and resize windows. By now, this is not possible without use of keyboard if you the dialog is higher than the screen (ALT+stylus), i.e. in the PDA mode windows should start maximized and have as few decorations as possible,
4.- behaviour of the WM can possibly change on-the-fly on the event of screen turning.
After some short feasibility study in the last days, I found that it might make sense to try to start from openbox. Other WMs are either not that configurable (IceWM), or configurable, but not transparently enough (e.g. E17), or not themeable well and having very complicated config (fvwm). I have still in game openbox and fvwm. openbox has also this idea os pipe-menus which might be handy in the PDA mode somehow...
Over that a desktop with features 1 and 2 should live. I am not aware of such. So either I extend and configure matchbox-desktop to be able to handle standalone icons, or I was thinking about extending idesk to handle those flexible menus in a certain area of screen. I already took a look at idesk source code and I think I would be able to extend it in the way I want (in the end, it's a fairly small piece of code). An idea of pipe-icon-sets similar to pipe-menus in openbox is needed to do that. Shouldn't be very difficult to do - at least I can easily imagine solution for such a functionality.
Let's see what will come out of that... Maybe nothing, but we are far from giving up yet, right? Don't worry, I am not a guy who complains endlessly and doesn't move his own ass... Somebody said it very nicely in some other thread of this forum: "see a problem - own the problem".
LATER EDIT:
walkman, are you saying all this because you have the hope that people here will begin to work together to define the next MEGA Linux Palmtop OS ?
Perhaps you would like to see innovations on this platform or upcoming ones? Are you waiting for a well defined roadmap? Good ideas like in the iPhone or the last HTC devices?
No need for irony here. If you feel offended by what I wrote above (possibly you are a developer and feel to be put down by a dumb user?), I am apologizing for that. It wasn't meant to offend anybody (possibly arouse :-) ).
What I wanted to see was whether it pays off for me to invest time and energy into a distro which at least goes somewhere. Innovations are done by people. But only if they
know the problem they are solving (that's a vision, or commitment, or call it as you like). Random ideas usually do not work very well... And solving a technical problem like e.g. how to compile X for Y, is much easier (although very much needed and extremely important) than finding out how to improve X so that it is just perfect for Y and then taking it to reality... I was only interested if there's such a feeling here around. Whether there's a need to improve the user-experience at all... I am not sure about that yet. I only know, I myself need it. Hence I have to help myself...
In the end, after some reading of past posts and threads of this forum, I started to believe that pdaXrom seems to have a brighter future than others. Because it seems to care specifically about this device. That seems to be a good promise... But that's just my personal feeling...
EVEN LATER EDIT:
So if you have any ideas how to improve user-experience on Z which might be connected to what I want (there's more than enough written about that in this thread), I am listening.
