Downsizing X?

Ewan Mac Mahon ewan at macmahon.me.uk
Tue Aug 2 06:22:18 CDT 2005


On Tue, Aug 02, 2005 at 01:36:47AM -0400, John Richard Moser wrote:
> I have an iPaq 3600 handheld running Familiar Linux with GPE.  The whole 
> shebang fits into 14M (though it's compressed).  
Is it? I've got a Zaurus which is mostly similar and it uses an about
14M jffs2 fs for the root which I don't think has any compression.

>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,
Not if it doesn't have much hardware. For an old PC there's no downside
in using the framebuffer for graphics because there's no 3d acceleration
in the first place, no downside in losing all the usb device drivers if
there's no usb to plug them into, and so forth.

>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.
> 
Familiar is built with the BitBake/OpenEmedded kit, which should be
reasonably generic and cross platform; you could probably get a lot of
the way there by starting with Familiar and tweaking it to build for
i386 instead of ARM. Indeed, IIRC there was some talk a while back of an
embedded Ubuntu; if there's still any interest in that it may be
possible to generalise it to minimal Ubuntu and build the same system
for i386/ARM/mips etc.

> 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 :)
Familiar is a good bit bigger than 14M if you count the package feeds
though, but it's hard to strip back a normal distro that much.

Ewan

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