On Fri, 3 Sep 1999, Walter Berthold wrote:
> Robert Findlay wrote:
> >
> > Does anyone know if an equivalent to QNX Photon (ie. reasonably small,
> > reasonably fast GUI engine) exists in the Linux world?
> >
> > We do lots of work where customers need a GUI embedded (touch screens etc.)
> > with the application in smallish memory boxes. Most people are saying
> > that Xwindows is too big and too resource intensive to consider for such
> > things.
> >
> > I'd appreciate hearing from those who have tried embedded GUI's in Linux.
>
> I am also developing on a GUI embedded system and was looking for a small and
> fast solution to do graphics. After some time I came back to the Xwindows.
> I think its NOT too resource intensive or slow because memory and CPU power
> are rapidly growing resources. (Its hard to find a PC-104 CPU board with
> less than 8 MB RAM and that is pretty enough).
>
> If you reduce to the minimum needs, disk space for Xwindows is about 5 MB.
> That is: Xserver 3 MB, Xlibs 1 MB, fonts etc. 500 kB.
> I recommend to use a comfortable graphics library like QT
> (http://www.troll.no) which adds 2 MB for the library.
>
> The system resources needed for that are much cheeper than an other
> really expensive resource: developing time!
I agree that it is sometimes convenient to use X, but it depends on your
volume. We decided on NanoX (not X Windows derived) over X Windows because
the space we saved (NanoX is less than 100kb) would translate into a
lot better margins. With a budgeted minimum of 200.000 units to be
produced of the product I'm working on _next year alone_, even if it
would be as little as 2-3 USD pr. unit we have no problem justifying using
a few extra developers on getting the software we need to run on NanoX
instead of X.
On the other hand, in our case it's also custom PCB designs etc. - a
standard PC104 unit would be way too expensive.
What it boils down to is that X Windows is the most convenient solution,
but it's a resource hog... And it depends on the number of units you're
going to produce whether it's worth it or not.
Vidar Hokstad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Director of Technical Development, Screen Media AS
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