World's Teeny-Tiniest Desktop Ever on the R01!

Ok, after a night of re-flashing the boot disk, and carefully re-customizing the OS again, I’m finally back online! Here’s a view of the twm desktop running four terminal apps at once (and frankly, struggling to keep up)…

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I don’t think that is the “teeniest desktop ever”. My PocketCHIP is a 4ish inch LCD with a whopping 480x272 pixels. It runs a regular Debian 8 X11 desktop. Although you don’t normally try to get two windows on the display at once. Basically you run everything maximized and [ALT]+[TAB] between running apps.

That is what I’ve been comparing performance to on this thread:

I’m really surprised by how slow the 64bit RISC-V is. And its really got me curious as to why. I’ll be doing more tests later.

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Here’s a funny one - they include Gimp in the install image :smiley: Why would you want to edit images on this teeny-tiny screen?

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Yes, I’ve removed about 2GB of software so far. I whittled the base image down to 3.2GB before I was too impatient and I wanted to start building my tools on it. I still have the whole suite of libs to review and I need to find a way to utterly annihilate SystemD. Its such a waste! 3min shutdown time is atrocious…

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I found i3m is ok as an alternative to twm. Ideally there would be options that didn’t really “require” X at all, and just run on the widescreen terminal in multiple panes or columns…

Nice to see all the experimentation here!

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I’m running OpenBox. It was already installed. I removed TWM. I thought TWM was just example code for what it takes to make a WM. I didn’t know people actually used it. :wink: And when you already have OpenBox, XFCE, and several other WMs already installed… why TWM? Weird choice.

If I can find the time and the RISC-V architecture doesn’t pose any significant problems I’ll compile E16. But at this point I’m thinking I’ll put the R01 away as a novelty and get an ARM based module for my daily driver.

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When I get time to dig into OpenBox, I’ll be sure to give it a spin on this thing. As it is, 4 days of tinkering has trashed this thing twice already. It’s a house of cards, and I’m barely aware of how all these different WMs work. So, for now, it’s good enough.

If you haven’t uninstalled it yet its easy to try. Just rem out the exec twm line in your .xinitrc and add a matching exec openbox line at the end. Then exit the window manager or reboot. I didn’t look to see if “twm” had an “exit” or “logout” on their menu. To switch back just reverse the changes and exit openbox from the application menu (below).

Your first impression won’t be much different from using “twm” other than the window decorations look more modern, keyboard focus works more normal and the published hot-keys will stop working. That’s one of the reasons I want E16. It has powerful keyboard capabilities!

You access the application menu by right-clicking the desktop. And you can get a workspace control menu with a middle-click on the desktop. Normally I’d use the scroll wheel to change virtual desktops, but this menu works too. :slight_smile: (anyone else having troubles without a scroll wheel?) You can configure window decorations and other OpenBox features with the “obconf” tool, which is installed on the default image. If you can’t find it on the menu launch it from a terminal (right-click desktop, click “terminal”, or [DOWN] [ENTER]).

FYI: OpenBox is the core under many other X11 environments, like LXDE. I use it because its relatively slim, reasonably fast and configurable. It also is “no frills”, meaning you can add whatever furinshings you want and it won’t get in the way. But that is a big discussion for another day.

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