[Pan-devel] Re: Suggesting additional enhacements & a maemo port

[Duncan]

"Anuj Verma (Kevin)" <address@hidden>
posted address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sat, 20 Jan 2007
02:48:32 +0000:

> Pop-out message screen will be more useful for a situation of small
> display and for full screen focus at-times.

It sounds as if you aren't yet aware of pan's tabbed interface mode, which
puts the three main window panes on tabs, thereby making them nearly
full-window.  Try it. =8^)

IMO, that's why we haven't seen too many requests for a separate message
window.  On my dual 1600x1200 workstation monitors, I regularly run pan
full-screen on one, so don't use tabbed mode a lot myself, but I just
tried it with the window resized to 800x480, and it seemed to work quite
well.  (Pan does need a full 800 px width for the toolbar, it appears, but
you have that on the hardware you have in mind.)

> Platform port request:
> Soon I will be owning a Nokia Internet tablet device N800, I will love
> to have this application ported there. Though I am not a developer
> myself I am not sure how much effort it will be other than compiling and
> packaging, but seems it is easy to do.
> 
> Nokia Linux devices are based on Maemo, and I feel good to share this
> thought across with you all, so if any of you can and will like help
> this vision will be full of joy for a user like me.

Checking your link, maemo seems to be X/GTK+ based, and so is pan, so
there's a reasonable chance it'll just need a recompile to the CPU arch in
question, no further porting effort required.  The Wp maemo link you
provided lists the crosscompiler used, so you may be able to install that
and compile pan directly, even as a user.  My guess is that if there's an
issue, it's likely to be memory architecture and management, and whether
it fits in the available memory at all or not.  I'm not sure how much of
that is handled by the already on the platform gtk and other libraries and
how much by pan itself, and I'm neither a dev nor a user with a lot of
embedded platform experience, so beyond that is pretty much beyond me.

If it were me, I'd certainly have a go at it, using the mentioned
cross-compiler, and see what happened.  The worst that can happen is that
you fail with an error that's beyond you to fix, and for which you can't
seem to get any help, but it might "just work", too.  You never know until
you try. =8^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman