From: James Nichols (smilr_at_mac.com)
Date: Sun Oct 17 2004 - 01:21:57 PDT
J Tyler Nichols
On Oct 17, 2004, at 1:42 AM, Jon Glass wrote:
>
> BTW, there is _nothing_ inherently _wrong_ with having a desktop OS on
> a handheld. This is where scalability would come in. It would have to
> know when it was being used as a handheld, and scale the environment
> appropriately, working with the stylus input and the necessary
> limitations of screen size, etc. I do not see this as an insurmountable
> obstacle. I think it will just take intelligence and some creative
> thinking to make it work and work well.
>
This wouldn't be just a desktop OS then would it?
The problem is that no-one has pulled this off yet - we could put a
full desktop os onto the OQO, and they have - but it isn't efficient.
The interface doesn't scale, the resource usage doesn't scale, the
power consumption doesn't scale - for THESE reasons the OQO is a poor
concept for a PDA. It isn't JUST a PDA, it's also the desktop computer,
and when given access to an external power supply and monitor can
fulfill this role quite well.
So it doesn't work well as a PDA with the default OS, but it works well
as a desktop system and a central store of all one's data (for a
business person writing text documents and entering spreadsheets 20
gigabytes of hard drive space is PLENTY). Would it work well for a
newton? Maybe...
I'm pretty certain people will be hacking a half desktop half linux PDA
os onto this thing - and that would be a great place to add in the
scalability that winXP currently lacks, but what of supporting the
newton via Einstein and linux? It depends on how much it turns out to
be linux, and how much it turns out to be newton OS. If we make things
mostly newton, with only the bare minimum of linux "glue" to tie the
newtOS to the hardware, we could leverage the 256 megs of ram. We could
hold the heap space and a relatively large data store resident in
memory at all times. This could be smart synchronized with the hard
drive when necessary and only when necessary in order to minimize hard
drive usage - thus saving power. WIth the os resident in memory we
could have instant-on like a real newton.
Take the flip side however - and make it run linux with "newton as
process #78" on top of it. This would likely be easier - we still use
linux for hardware level interface - but instead of hacking the new
into a low level, perhaps even into the kernel if we REALLY want to get
deep, we made it essentially another application on top of a full linux
install - back to a desktop os, with desktop memory paging and hardware
usage.
Easy but power inefficient? Complex and fully integrated? That's the
big question - not how well the OQO runs now, but how well we can make
it run as a Newton.
(Besides - can you imagine plugging this thing into it's dock, and
having a color newton os come up on your 17 inch monitor with touch
screen overlay? :)
-- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
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