Vivaldi Tablet

[Chad Perrin]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 09:07:25AM +1000, Da Rock wrote:
> On 03/27/12 01:42, Chad Perrin wrote:
> >
> >I think the point of the initial email to start this thread was to see if
> >there were people in the community with an interest in working on this
> >project, and might actually be a fairly logical step toward an effort to
> >"find a 'guru'" to work on it.
>
> Actually I think the point of the email was to prop up the member
> numbers on the site. The platform itself is just an ordinary aPad
> which can be hacked. As for the open source community interest, well
> it already runs linux natively- android- so not entirely sure what
> the fuss is about (might explain the population there).

Android is not the same as a full-featured Unix-like OS.  It's a
miserably underpowered half-measure, whose only redeeming feature is that
it's not Apple iOS or MS WP7.  There's a bit of a difference, there.

. . . not that I much care about tablets per se, right now, though it
would be nice if I could get a ThinkPad X-series tablet-laptop working
with FreeBSD.  I just wouldn't equate Android with a general-purpose
Unix-like OS, even if that OS uses a Linux kernel and gets most of the
userland subtly wrong.


> 
> If anyone was interested in porting FreeBSD to tablets there are
> plenty of dev kits out there to play with; and if the cost is
> excessive then grab an aPad off eBay for $50.

I'm not sure how that disputes what I said.


> 
> To explain the major hurdle in porting to a tablet, you'd need to
> probably find an alternative windowing solution then Xorg (low
> memory, especially in vivaldi)- I'm not 100% sure what iOS and
> Android use. Might be interesting...

Yeah, there could be some real challenges there.  The question is whether
someone with the wherewithal to do the work would find the challenge
attractive.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]