Re: [Chicken-users] chicken scheme + gui on Nokia n800 or n810?

[Shawn Rutledge]

On Dec 5, 2007 6:53 PM, Matthew Welland <address@hidden> wrote:
> Has anyone attempted this? Which gui (if any) works?
>
> I see this:
>
> http://zedstar.org/blog/2007/11/07/latest-chicken-scheme-packaged-for-openmoko/
>
> which is encouraging (Thanks go to the maintainer). However does
> chicken-setup work and can I install eggs? Also does it work with OS2008?

You need gcc in order for chicken-setup to work.  This is why I first
mount an SD card as /usr (to have some space), install task-base-dev,
plus probably some other stuff I forgot about, and then compile the
whole chicken right on the phone (which takes a long time).  But it's
also supposed to be possible to cross-compile individual eggs.  Maybe
someday they can be built by bitbake and made into ipkg's and put into
the feeds, so you can install them individually.

As for GUIs I keep plodding along on my Display Scheme design.  Except
I got distracted with GPS lately, now that it works on the phone.  And
got distracted playing with OpenStreetMap, because the map data has to
come from somewhere.  I will probably write a GPS mapping app for
Display Scheme soon.

So far it uses just the framebuffer.  But I have a Nokia 770 too (they
got so cheap I couldn't resist).  My plan is to do a port of Display
Scheme that uses xlib, and try to integrate it into Maemo.

All this will no doubt take a couple more years (at least).  I haven't
implemented any high-level abstractions that I have in mind... just a
small set of widgets (which are themselves not finished) and a couple
of rough proof-of-concept applications.  Maybe will use the GPS app to
push from both ends at the same time... try to write the app using
abstractions that don't exist yet, and then make it realizable.  But I
have to flesh out my Scheme-to-Scheme IPC ideas better.  Individual
applications (at least the non-trivial ones) will be separate
processes, talking to the DS "head" (or multiple heads) over a "pipe"
(an abstract comm channel) which will be a TCP socket at first... with
other possible implementations existing someday (Bluetooth RFCOMM,
Unix sockets, HTTP, serial line, SSH, etc.)  There needs to be a
discovery mechanism of course.  I'm thinking of installing a Gumstix,
wired to a dedicated GPS, in my car.  The GPS app would run on the
Gumstix processor, and the display is on any mobile device that has
Bluetooth and Display Scheme.  It should even be faster because the
"server" does the mapping and routing work while the "client" just
needs to display stuff.  Whereas on the Neo, client and server can
both be on the same phone... but if you try running PyRoute on the
phone, you can see what the result is like. :-)  (quite slow)  Of
course I would hope that compiled Chicken code will be much faster
than Python.  And I will be avoiding XML wherever possible, which
should also help.

Anyway I bet you could compile the xlib egg on the phone, if the
prerequisites are all in place (headers & libs).