[plug] Use for low end machines, light GUI browser [was Newby with SUSE 6.2 on a P100/16Meg]

[The Thought Assassin]

On Sun, 30 Jul 2000, Michael Hunt wrote:
> > May I ask, is there a compact/lite GUI browser [no, not lynx :) ]
> > that will run on lean pcs ?
> sorry until mozilla is complete there isn't really one I could
> recommend. Galleon (I think) looks promising but as it is using the
> mozilla core it is not really an option at this very point in time.
How does that work? Is there something wrong with the Mozilla core that we
don't know about?

> What I would really like to see is the Linux community come up with
> something like QNX who have fit a microGUI, browser an relevant OS stuff
> onto a single floppy disk!!!!
There's something called Microwindows or similar in the works that is
aimed at doing this for pamltops - though I think it will take up more
than a floppy-worth of space. I don't know that it is possible to have a
standards-compliant browser with all the expected features and an
acceptable interface in so small a footprint these days. The kernel can be
trimmed a lot for an embedded device where you know in advance exactly
what the kernel needs to support, but to trim down the windowing server is
a mistake in my opinion. Having an effective networkable graphics server
is going to be one of the keys to flexibility and getting
bang-for-your-buck in a palmtop in the future. It's not going to be
possible to fit everything you want in a palmtop, but if it has sufficient
communications bandwidth and a good graphics infrastructure, then it can
at least display the front end of programs it could never hope to run
itself. Surely it can't be long until we see base-stations around the
coutry side for that sort of thing, the way we do for mobile phones at
present? There is already a lot of fuss about the coming ASP paradigm, so
it is only sensible to expect that to downscale to the palmtop.

> You cant really do that with Linux at the moment because X is so big but
> if something else can put together open source wise then I think that
> this would be the greatest achievement for the open source movement up
> until now.
I'm afraid I completely disagree with you about this. Fitting a web
browser onto a floppy is only useful if you have a network, and if you
have a network, you are not resource-limited anyway. I don't really see
the point. It's a nice demo for QNX, but it'll never amount to anything in
production. It's a gizmo to get across the size and customizability of QNX
to the PHBs who wouldn't understand if you showed them software on the
same scale that actually does something useful.

> All I can say is embedded OS's are very very very interesting at this point
> in time !!!!
They are. but only because they are getting more networkable, and the
networks are getting more pervasive. You are dead right about this, for
the simple reason that you are dead wrong about the above. :)

-Greg Mildenhall