Downsizing X?

John Richard Moser nigelenki at comcast.net
Tue Aug 2 00:36:47 CDT 2005


I have an iPaq 3600 handheld running Familiar Linux with GPE.  The whole 
shebang fits into 14M (though it's compressed).

This also easily loads on 64M devices relatively fast.  An X/GPE 
environment runs on an iPaq with 32M of disk (flash) and 64M of RAM with 
plenty of space to spare.

Besides the obvious fact that it needs about 1/16 the memory to store 
the screen information on a small device, and that there's a billion 
drivers needed for a general desktop, would anything make it 
particularly unrealistic to fit an X install into under 200 megs of 
disk?  These embedded OSes have image browsers, file managers, music 
players, web browsers, text editors, and PIM software.

I guess that when you can't make tight assumptions, the system has to be 
several thousand megs in size instead of a few megs :)
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