[Jaffa Software]

Tuesday 20 February 2007

Running Debian proper alongside Maemo

Detlef Schmicker has posted to maemo-developers the first results of his hack to use VNCViewer to connect to a locally running Debian instance on the tablet to solve the keyboard/input issues.

He's had Firefox, Gimp and Xterm all running on his N800 in the IceWM window manager, with VNCviewer providing the keyboard. No network connection was necessary.

It's a very cool hack, it'll be interesting to see if it can be packaged for end-user use.

2 comments:

  1. VNC is OK, but I was actually more excited by the ability to run X-windows applications by remote control. I installed the xterm program and SSH (the description of which didn't make clear whether it was the client component, server or both), and then from an Xterm window:

    ssh -X userid@192.168.0.10
    password:*****

    and I could do just about anything I wanted on the target machine. I am a KDE user so I launched konqueror from which I could also launch firefox, read e-mail, move files around, reboot or shutdown the remote system.

    To me this makes a lot more sense when the target system is also Linux based. For a remote Windows or OSX system VNC would be needed of course. While OS X supports X-windows, none of the standard OS X applications support OS X.

    Using X-windows, each newly launch application has it's own window on the N800.

    What I still haven't figured out how to do on the N800 is to do the equivalent of "right click" on something. I'm sure there must be a secret keypress or something to do this.

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  2. What is performance like when running Firefox locally?

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