gcmartin wrote:So that my last post doesn't appear to vague, here's a couple of concerns:
Will the trek to more Linuxes on Touch devices start from additional added to the base OS? Does the base OS, today, have the chipset support to bring the screen interaction into the system for Window manager use?
And, is the Window manager used by Android (mentioned earlier) capable of being "dropped" into a Linux such that applications can be manipulated in much the same way as is manipulated in Android-x86? If so, did Ubuntu do something like this?
Just trying to understand how this actually is done?
Touch support is already in the kernel, but it doesnt cover all the hardware options out there. In fact it's been in the kernel since the 2.30 days, but it wasnt utilitzed by pretty much anyone.
So to go from a regular wm to a touch WM... you'd need to take several steps.
1) make sure you chosen hardware is driver compatible with whats in the kernel,
If its not, find opensource drivers for it (good luck), or write your own.
2) configure your system for the types of touch input you want to use, this means configuring the device input options for how the driver will read the sensors in the screen. You need to decide what will be what.
3) redesign your WM to take into account touch control. Fingers work differently than mouses, so visually things will need to be a tad different.
4) Edit whatever programs in whatever way you want so that they can take advantage of your new input gestures.
What google has done with android honestly isnt very helpful. Yes Android is linux, But its linux as far as the kernel. Android is mostly a Java stack running on top of the linux kernel. So it isnt very helpful for real linux distros. Android doesnt run any form of the X enviroment, so usability of googles work drops to almost nil.
Now toss out the WM on your computer, code a Java WM, and then you would be able to port some of googles code over, but you wont get real far, because then none of your common linux apps will want to run, because they want to run in X and not in a java gui.
Now once Canonical released their image for the ubuntu phones, everyone can have a look at what they've done. I dont see them using X on a phone because of processor demand, so they will probably go the same route and just run a java stack on top of the kernel, but who knows. Canonical has the $ and Devs to throw at this; anything is possible.