[OE-core] The Mythical Sato Replacement

[Martin Jansa]

On Mon, Jul 09, 2012 at 10:06:11PM +0100, Burton, Ross wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been mulling over a replacement for the Sato environment for some
> time now, so I think it's time to talk about my thoughts and get more
> feedback from users of oe-core.
> 
> Some background: back in 2007[1] Sato was designed to be an
> reference/demo PDA environment for mobile devices with (relatively!)
> high-DPI but physically small screens[2], such as the Sharp Zaurus and
> Nokia 770/N800/N810/etc.  It was designed to look visually distinctive
> compared to the competition at the time, and demonstrate all the
> features that a handheld PDA should have (at the time).  I think it's
> fair to say it mostly succeeded at that although it didn't exactly set
> the world on fire.
> 
> Fast-forward five years: Sato is still part of oe-core and showing
> it's age and unsuitability for the requirements that oe-core now has
> compared to the original design requirements for Sato.
> 
> So, what does oe-core require from a graphical environment?  As this
> is oe-core the list should be fairly short, so how about:
> - some way of launching arbitrary applications
> - a terminal
> - a text editor
> - a web browser
> - network configuration
> - an interactive test suite for verifying that various pieces of
> hardware are working: play a media file, show touchscreen events,
> display key events, and so on.  More about this later.
> - lightweight
> 
> There's also a set of anti-requirements:
> - no half-baked PIM suite
> - no games
> - no giant dependency stack or tight integration into the rest of
> oe-core.  Pulling the Sato replacement out entirely, or reusing parts
> of it, should be easily done.
> 
> Re-using an existing environment is one option but I don't think it's
> a great one.  LXDE is very minimal but the Windows 95 aesthetic isn't
> exactly attractive, XFCE is surprisingly large these days.  We don't
> really want much, so I think maintaining our own shell is a worthwhile
> investment.
> 
> Hopefully there aren't any objections so far?  I'll assume not, and
> introduce my proposal for Project Shuku[3].
> 
> Shuku will be a descendent of Sato, that is continue to use the
> Matchbox Window Manager, Desktop, and Panel; although the latter two
> will be updated for GTK+ 3.  All applications will be removed and
> fully reconsidered when adding back, so the text editor might well
> change from leafpad to something that had a release in two years,
> Midori is looking like a good web browser choice instead of Web, the
> PIM suite removed, and so on.
> 
> The interesting bit is then the test application.  We need a graphical
> environment so that we can run applications specific to our needs (and
> the desktop handles this fine already) and verify that the system is
> in fact working correctly.  Currently this is done in an ad-hoc
> manner: using the music player to play audio files, gst-launch to play
> videos, poking at the the touchscreen to verify that it works.  I'm
> proposing a specific test application so that instead of attempting to
> use general purpose applications as test tools, we have a specific
> tool.
> 
> For example, when playing back a video file it's important that any
> hardware acceleration available is actually used.  The test tool could
> play the file using GStreamer's playbin and then display the resulting
> pipeline so you can verify that VAAPI is being used, the correct audio
> sink, the correct network source, and so on.  To verify that the input
> devices are working, list them at the evdev level and let you see the
> raw events, display touches, and so on.
> 
> I've also been considering the brave new world of Wayland.  Whilst
> porting to GTK+ 3 all of the X11-specific code can be logically
> separated so that a small Weston plugin can be written that integrates
> the pieces together.  This will give a Wayland-native graphical
> environment that is visually identical to the X environment.
> 
> There's plenty of other things to discuss -- visual design and so on
> -- but that can wait for another day.
> 
> So those are my thoughts.  Any comments?

Why not use enlightenment? It works good with meta-efl layer and it
looks like there will be E17 release after all :)
http://e17releasemanager.wordpress.com/
so we won't need to use so much stuff from svn recipes.

Cheers,

> 
> Ross
> 
> [1] Five years ago!
> http://www.burtonini.com/wordpress/2007/08/01/poky-linux-3-0-blinky-released/
> [2] QVGA, for example, was explicitly not a target.  The Sharp Zaurus,
> a typical test device, had a VGA screen.
> [3] In the glorious tradition of naming projects by translating words
> to other languages, I ended up with 尗 (U+5C17) which means "younger of
> brothers", and Shuku is one of the pronunciations.
> 
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-- 
Martin 'JaMa' Jansa     jabber: Martin.Jansa at gmail.com
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