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Originally Posted by Gavrahil
For those who're only human... could someone translate please?
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In a nutshell:
The iLiad architecture and operating system seems to have some similarities to a PDA (electronic organizer). This PDA is called Zaurus and it was made by Sharp.
Like the iLiad the Zaurus is running a flavour of Embedded Linux as operating system. Trial and Error has shown, that some of applications created for the Zaurus can also be used on the iLiad. That means, that we can take some of the Zaurus applications, install them on the iLiad and pray that they run.
The interesting thing is, that the Zaurus is a very special, that means a very geeky PDA, resulting in people with too long hair and too much time
trying to create their own applications or even their own operating system for the device. As there are really many people of this kind out there, this resulted in many different home brown operating systems being created for the Zaurus personal digital assistant. As these operating systems have to be written in the flash memory of the device, they are often called ROMs:
- Sharp ROM: factory OS from Sharp (in thrilling Japanese)
- Cacko ROM: a Sharp ROM on steroids (a russian guy made some serious modifications)
Those two use a graphical user interface, which was created by a Norwegian company called "Trolltech". You can think about this graphical userinterface as an embedded linux application, which offers other applications its services like all inclusive catering for window elements, dialogs, touchscreen- and key events. The name of this gui (graphical userinterface) is nearly as funny as the name of the company itself. It's called "Qtopia", or in short "Qt".
Now some of the guys with the too long hair and the too much time decided not to like Qt, because it comes or comes not with some licensing problem. They therfore decided to create their own graphical userinterface, called "Opie". In this process they even modified the underlying embedded linux operating system: "Open Zaurus" was born.
- Open Zaurus: new embedded linux with new graphical userinterface OPIE
Now some of the guys of the guys with too long hair and the too much time decided that this is all Kindergarten and that the poor little but very powerful Zaurus should run a graphical user interface like it's Linux desktop cousins do: X-Windows
So they took some serious magic and time and out came: pdaxROM
- pdaxROM: new (?) embedded linux with x-Server and window manager
pdaxROM uses an embedded linux with an application called X-Server. This X-Server gives the other graphical applications all the windows and input methods they need. Unfortunately it does not give them window elements like buttons and dialogs. Therefore another application on top of the x-Server on top of the Embedded Linux operating system was needed: The window manager "Matchbox". It's called window manager, because it manages the windows supplied by the X-Server.
Now the really interesting thing is, that the iLiad is pretty much like a Zaurus running pdaxrom. That means: It has Embedded Linux with X-Server on top and Matchbox on top of the top.
It should therefore be possible to "borrow" some stuff from pdaxROM and to put it into the iLiad. It should also be possible to "borrow" non graphical stuff from one of the other ROMs for the Zaurus.
Gaim was borrowed this way. It is an application, which should allow us instant messaging on the iLiad. Now the only problem is, that we don't have an application called "xterminal" running on the iLiad yet. Such an xterminal is needed to run non graphical applications in a window on top of all the other stuff. Of course we could also run non graphical applications outside the graphical X-Server. But then we wouldn't see them without connecting another computer to the iLiad. And that would probably be really to geeky for every day use. But wait, where did I put my Zaurus...
Puuuuh... I hope I didn't produce too much confusion with this post. In any way, I am no linux expert myself. I only imported a Zaurus and had to learn some stuff in order to use it the way it really shouldn't be used according to the Japanese guys who invented it...
Btw: Please don't be angry about the long hair thing.... I have too much time myself.
And please correct me if necessary. It's still confusing for me...