On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 2:48 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz<bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu> wrote: > Sharp PC-Z1: > http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/27/sharps-5-inch-pc-z1-netwalker-honors-the-zaurus-legacy/ > > Nokia N900: > http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/ > > A new wave of devices is approaching. They have touchscreens, but they > also have qwerty keyboards. They have long battery life, and built-in > wireless networking. They are lightweight, and sized well for children. > They use Cortex A8 processors based on a core licensed from ARM. They are > designed to allow the user to replace the operating system as she chooses, > but they only support one kernel: Linux. > > In my view, these devices are a natural target for Sugar, despite lacking > full-size keyboards ideal for programming. They are ready for us. In > fact, the PC-Z1 ships with Ubuntu preinstalled. > > Unfortunately, we are not ready for them. Specifically, we have two major > issues to solve: > > 1. Many Activities contain Fedora 9 x86-32 binary code, and just won't run > on other platforms. We need to reach a consensus on a multiplatform > standard for Activities, and then implement it. The options for such a > standard are obvious enough. The hard part is to choose the right one, > implement it, and make it stick.
Are you up for championing this? Abstracting out architecture dependant code is painful yet very necessary process. david > 2. We have not done the work needed to make our interface work well on a > touch-screen, with or without a stylus. As touch-screens become more > common, we risk being left behind. > > If you have the hardware to test these features, and the interest to make > them happen, I urge you to take a lead. Solving these problems is an > important contribution that you can make. > > > _______________________________________________ > Sugar-devel mailing list > Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel > > _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel