starhawk wrote:Chrome or Chromium
I'll skip this unless someone can point me to an existing binary that work. Reason? see below about libreoffice. Somebody talked about pre-built Chromium waterfall which didn't quite work in Fatdog64 due to missing dependencies, we'll see if it fares better in FatdogArm - if an ARM version already exists in binary form (it should, ChromeOS runs on ARM).
(with full capabilities including flash
Ah yes, Flash. The only one that comes with full Flash support now is XO-4; even XO-1.75 doesn't have it (licensing problems). The reason is simple - it is closed-source software; so we are the mercy of Adobe. If Adobe doesn't release the binaries for us - then we don't have it. I've read people using ChromeOS flash player (Pepperflash, yes that's the one - the ARM version) with limited success - but then you have to be running Chromium.
and extension support
This would be less of a problem if you can solve the first two above
LibreOffice (or a nearly identical substitute)
Right now I only have Abiword and Gnumeric. Gnumeric is good enough for most tasks; abiword, not very. Libreoffice doesn't have ready-made ARM binaries, but we should be able to build one (do you know that the source of chromium, a *web browser*, is a couple of times larger than the size of libreoffice source code, a *full fledged office suite*? That's the reason I *flatly refuse* to build chromium from source. Gzipped source of seamonkey is around 150MB. Gzipped source of chromium is in the GBs range. You may disagree with me but I hold the opinion that chrome/chromium goodness is way overhyped and overstated. )
Anyway, the reason I didn't attempt to build libreoffice before is because I didn't see the point - Mele wasn't power enough to build it (it already struggled to build seamonkey). I may try this on the odroid later when beta is stable.
Some sort of professional vector art program (better than Inkscape, needs to support Corel *.cdr files)
Such as?
Printing support for Canon and HP printers (including printing 11x17 paper for Canons; the HP is an all-in-one)
Scanning support for HP and Xerox scanners (the HP is that all-in-one, and the Xerox is oooooold but works nicely)
Hardware support depends on drivers provided by the vendor. Most postscript printers are okay; but some inkjets require proprietary blobs that only exist on certain architecture; if they don't supply you the blobs for ARM then you can only bite your fingers ...
That being said, I don't have a lot of printers for testing (in fact I only have one - an old Epson TX100 - and that one works). You know the go-to man for any printer, scanner and dvd/blueray issues is rcrsn51; but he isn't involved in the ARM arena yet.
Wine would be super amazing but I'm not expecting it
Wine only works on x86/x86_64, unfortunately.
Music player
Xine and mplayer in alpha, VLC in beta.
Picture viewer (I like Viewnior, a lot -- hint, hint)
yes, viewnior is the default on both alpha and beta.
Support for USB flash media (not bootable, just for files)
Yes, working now.
IceWM support
IceWM package will be available in beta. But it's not configured, so I'm happy to accept contributions (must be properly multi-user configured).
can8v wrote:uses something other than Seamonkey.
Seamonkey gives the best bang for the buck.
I don't like JWM or ROX
JWM and ROX are the lightest weight all-round window managers, file managers, and desktop. Both are acquired taste. I don't fancy JWM but I have to admit that it is excellent for what it is doing. ROX is the lightest-weight desktop+filemanager, unfortunately it is no longer maintained so eventually it will go away - but while it works, it will stay.
I love XFCE, and LXDE
XFCE is nice, but it is not lightweight. We already have some of LXDE (ie openbox and lxpanel), it is a matter of bringing other LXDE programs into it.
I like Thunar, xfe, PCman and SpaceMan
Spaceman is more or less a replacement for PCMan. I considered to build SpaceFM before but haven't gotten around to do it. xfe is ok - I'll keep it in my todo list (xfe requires fltk). I can't remember where Thunar came from - is it from XFCE?
java
Yes, I want to have java too - I looked at it recently, on ARM it is not as easy in x86 because you *have* build it instead of using Oracle binaries; and building it is a bit of chicken and egg; because to build java you need ... java (seriously: to build java you need "Ant" build tool; and to run "Ant" you need java ... that is among many other similar things)
I'll see if I can get Debian's OpenJDK to run on FatdogArm instead.
a package manager
FatdogArm uses slapt-get and gslapt; which is quite nice (I think) and faster than Fatdog64's own package manager.
with all the packages I need.
FatdogArm is compatible for Slackbuilds (for building from source). I will include sbopkg (slackbuild package manager) in beta. I don't have the tool yet, but in theory it should be possible to use Debian armhf packages on FatdogArm beta as well as they have the same hardware platform requirement (you can't do that for alpha because the hardware requirement *was* different).
All I really expect out of the box though is for my hardware to be supported
To put things into perspective: I'm just one person with limited resources; so support can only go so far. *Especially* hardware support, and *especially* in the ARM world where every device is different ...
I can't test with hardware I don't own. People like Jemimah and rcrsn51 went as far as *buying* devices so that they can test them; I don't have that kind of resources to do the same; I've got kids to feed
I am quite happy to take whatever I can get.
And you can make it better by contributing packages (when you get up and running) or other things.
Thank you JB007 and all who helped make this happen.
No worries, and again I would thank the anonymous benefactor who kindly gave me the boards and to mavrothal who sponsored me to get the XOs, and kirk who started
Fatdog project in the first place.
cheers!