Embedded X

[Jim Gettys]

On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 09:21 -0700, William Tracy wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 7:29 AM, Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org> wrote:
> > Does uClibc actually buy you anything?
> 
> It saves space (glibc chews up what, twenty megabytes?) and it
> supports MMU-less hardware, when paired with the uClinux kernel
> patches.

Not when glibc isn't built with every locale in the world...  

My point is really to compare apples to apples; generally, once running
X, you also are interested in running GTK/Qt based toolkits, which may
have stronger requirements on libc than X does.  So blindly saying
"uClibc is smaller, so it must save space" doesn't necessarily follow.
Some more careful analysis is in order.

> 
> As for KDrive vs. Xorg: I've heard some people claim that it actually
> plays better with certain laptop and mobile hardware out of the box
> than Xorg does--Xorg tries to autodetect too aggressively, and causes
> problems. I'm also told that it is possible to run KDrive (or was it
> TinyX?) in four megs of RAM. :-)
> 

So make the configuration static, or even build Xorg statically. 

When keithp and I were working on Kdrive on the iPAQ years ago, we had
16 meg of RAM.  I think the IBM watch had 8 meg.

But that isn't where most of the RAM goes anyway.
                           - Jim



-- 
Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child