[Openicc] Fedora CM, was: Google Summer of Code . . .

[Robert Krawitz]

   From: Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com>
   Date: Fri, 21 May 2010 16:51:41 -0600

   On May 21, 2010, at 9:25 AM, Hal V. Engel wrote:

   > On Friday 21 May 2010 01:57:45 am Richard Hughes wrote:
   >> Lets assume there are approximately a billion personal computers, i.e.
   >> desktops and laptops. Lets say 0.5% of them are being used with a
   >> fairly up to date Linux, which I think is somewhat optimistic. That's
   >> 5 million Linux desktops to aim for.
   >> 
   > 
   > I see this type of think fairly often on Linux forums and email lists.  But 
   > are only 0.5% of end user machines running Linux?    
   > 
   > Several years ago I read a report (in InfoWorld I think) that put the 
   > installed market share of Linux end user machines at 4%.

   Two points related to this persistent statistic of conversation
   from the color geek who uses Macs (in my defense I do have Fedora
   running on a separate laptop so that I might only be 98% ignorant
   rather than 100%):

   1.
   For all practical purposes Linux forms the basis of
   Android. Gartner expects Android to take over the iPhone by
   2012. It doesn't matter if that happens or not, what does matter is
   that the number of handheld devices running Android is significant
   and likely will continue to be significant.

The question is exactly what the entire Android stack is.

"Linux", strictly speaking, refers to the operating system kernel --
the component that runs at privileged level (not to be confused with a
normal process running as superuser, which has privileges granted by
the operating system, but doesn't have special privileges on the
processor).  The kernel will never have color management -- it
actually knows nothing at all about graphics.  Its job is simply to
manage the hardware resources and user-level processes that run on it.

What's layered above that is where things get interesting.  In a
"traditional" Linux or UNIX system, there's a userland consisting of
the user commands (sh, grep, ls, cat, etc) that constitute "UNIX".
There are some low level system libraries that supply shared services
to all programs, in particular the "C library" or "libc".  These also
don't know anything about graphics; they basically work at a command
line level.

Above that comes the graphics system, the X server and its clients.
This is the first layer that knows anything about graphics.  Above
that come the desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, Xfce, or whatnot), and
above that come the applications.  Color management is likely to
happen somewhere at this level.

What does this have to do with Android?  Well, the problem is,
"precious little".  There's nothing that says that the userland *has*
to be the stack above; that's just the stack normally used on "Linux"
systems.  It might be some kind of embedded stack that might have very
little that looks even vaguely like a UNIX environment, and its
graphics system may not even be based on X.  It probably isn't using
either GNOME or KDE, so any color management at that level won't be of
any use.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom  --  http://ProgFree.org
Project lead for Gutenprint   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton