Xmonad on my mobile phone

Published 2008-08-09 in sections English, Debian, Openmoko.

Here at DebConf 8 in Argentinia, I’m working on getting Debian to work on the OpenMoko Freerunner Smartphone. We are progressing quite nicely, soon having the same features as the official freesmartphone.org image. See the pkg-fso wiki page for more on that.

And why do we want to do that? Because we can use everything in the Debian archive on our phones!

This is the xmonad window manager, programmed in Haskell and usually running on my Desktop, now on my mobile phone! And it’s almost usable. Only problem is that the screen keyboard, metacity-keyboard, gets the focus by xmonad, so I can’t actually type into other windows. This could be fixed by configuring xmonad, but for that, I need to install ghc and I do not have these 280MB left on my SD card...

Update: I even made it on the front page of the xmonad home page with this image:

Comments

that's pretty sweet!

#1 thomas hartman (Homepage) am 2008-08-09

Yes, ghc is quite a heavy dependency, considering that xmonad itself is kind of a lightweight wm…

#2 Daniel am 2008-08-09

BTW, it seems you are a unicode geek as well… :–)

#3 Joachim Breitner (Homepage) am 2008-08-09

It's not like gcc is any more feasible on a cell phone :P

#4 fabjan am 2008-08-09

Use the PlainConfig text config parser extension. You can use a text file instead of a haskell file to configure xmonad, and thus remove the need for GHC on the target.

#5 Don Stewart (Homepage) am 2008-08-09

what about running xmonad remotely? :)

#6 rektide (Homepage) am 2008-08-09

Not much less cheating than using gimp :-)

#7 Joachim Breitner (Homepage) am 2008-08-09

Hi. I'm heavy xmonad user and I thought about trying it on FreeRunner, but I never thought I bump onto someone who actually did it. :-)

How's the usability of this thing on FR? xmonad (and other tiling wms as well) is heavy keyboard-dependent, isn't it a drawback to not have a proper keyboard on OpenMoko phone? Or maybe you're using an external keyboard for control?

#8 harnir (Homepage) am 2008-08-10

I only stated that I ran it on my Freerunner, not that I use it :-)

#9 Joachim Breitner (Homepage) am 2008-08-10

Have something to say? You can post a comment by sending an e-Mail to me at <mail@joachim-breitner.de>, and I will include it here.

Go up