Alternative Desktop - Update 1.

An anonymous commenter posted a comment on here about a number of grips about 3MX. One of them was the resource hunger of X11. X11 is commonly known as the X Windows System which is a software system that runs on Linux to allow it to implement Graphical User Interfaces similar to Windows.

On that point, I agree with the commenter. While 3MX does work, there is a lag on even basic applications like calculator and calender that does not make it a slick experience to that of a full spec machine.

At the end of the post, the commenter then proposed working on a using a command line interface approach.

This got my looking at my thoughts of an avatar based Desktop. Leaving out the Sci-fi stuff, it could be implemented on the mini-book with the use of the Linux framebuffer. The below link is the wiki page on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_framebuffer

There are programs already like mplayer that uses the framebuffer and a library called directfb which is used to create implementations of Graphical User interfaces on embedded systems.It could be possible to implement something practical which I proposed that hopefully won't be too resource hungry.

Firstly, the framebuffer is already enabled on 3MX. I had run Midnight Commander and I'm sure that it ran in framebuffer mode with mouse enabled. I will have to double check that to make sure.

Secondly, a user interface could be written with DirectFB to implement an area where the logical code of speech could be entered. As mentioned in previous post, rather than having the concept of computer programs like email, internet, calender etc, it is changed to entering commands in a normal type of speech without the user needing to know the name of any particular program.

An area of the screen would be setup in order for the user to interact with the program. I can't see why this would not be too hard to do as it could be a window to a linux program without the windows decoration like as mentioned by the anon poster eLinks, w3m-img, Mutt mail etc.

I think the biggest hurdle in this respect is to make it homogeneous to give the user the impression it one big seamless interface rather than a group of separate programs and windows.

Another big problem is how the user would access saved files like emails and saved documents without resorting to the concept of a hierarchical computer filesystem. There are technologies like Gnome's beagle that do something similar.

This could work in tandem with a distro like 3MX. I'm not sure how this would be done. Could there be a Bash script to prompt user either to go into this desktop or if they wanted to do something more, call startx to run the X11 distro? If so, it would be better than trying to design a boot loader.

I'll have a look at DirectFB to see if this is possible from a 'graphical' point of view.