Me:
> > Well, the thing about X is that it's client-server. That means
> > that when I'm on the subway, I can use the stylus and touch screen,
> > and when I'm at my desk, I can use my keyboard and 1600x1200 (at
> > work) monitor.
Russell C.:
> Speaking for myself, when running a laptop (1024x768) or desktop
> (1280x1024 or more) I want to also run an all-singing-all-dancing
> desktop environment such as KDE 3.1. This requires significantly
> more RAM and storage than is possible on an iPaQ at the moment.
My point wasn't that I want exactly the same environment in both
places; my point was that I wanted to be able to run the (X-based) apps
on the iPAQ against the iPAQ display sometimes, and against my
desktop's display other times. I.e., ssh into the ipaq with X
forwarding (or the standard xauth tricks) from my desktop, and run
exactly the same binaries *on the same processor* that I run from the
subway, but run them on a big screen with a nice keyboard. That's easy
to do with X (well, maybe "easy" is an overstatement, especially before
ssh came on the scene). Somebody else pointed out VNC addresses a big
part of that functionality (although I like the fact that the windows
of my iPAQ apps running on the iPAQ can be bigger when I'm sitting at
my desktop, and I can use all three mouse buttons, and copy and paste).
To take an analogy, if you have a firewall sitting in the closet
running on a 386 with 16Mb of RAM, no, you can't realistically run
GNOME and GIMP on it, but it's nice to be able to use the same editor
to edit config files on it that you use on your main workstation, and
even nicer to be able to do that while sitting at your main
workstation.
(Apologies if all this is redundant and you got my point in the first
place; I wasn't quite sure from your reply.)
-j.
PS - An alternative approach, a la what Palm does, is to sync the data,
do a really good job of that, and run different apps on both machines
editing the same data. That has its appeal, in that it makes it easy to
have a desktop environment that sucks up, er, I mean takes advantage of,
all the resources of your beefy desktop machine, but I mostly use stuff I
write myself, so I'd be developing it under X on my desktop anyway.
Received on Tue Jan 14 21:26:25 2003
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