Survex on PDA

[Wookey]

On 2006-10-16 19:45 -0200, Carlos Guâno Grohmann wrote:
> So, I was thinking about running Survex (cavern+aven) + Therion on a
> Linux-based PDA.. any advices on that? Which model would be better,
> etc..

I did this a few years ago on an ipaq (3630 vintage). I used xcaverot
because aven was too heavy for it. (and the uncluttered screen works
better on a 1/4 VGA device. I also had to write a slightly modified
version to allow switching between mouse-button modes (because a
touchscreen only has one type of button, and xcaverot/aven rely
heavily on left ans right clicks). Using a PDA modifier button would
work better, but is quite device specific. 'PDA mode' code should
still be in xcavrot codebase.

I also got therion running on debian-arm on a psion netbook, but it
was very slow to use. Too slow for drawing anything serious (that was
a 400Mhz xscale with an 800x600 screen, but the screen refresh was slow) 

Therion needs a lot of stuff to run (all of tetex, tcl/tk). It's a few
hundred MB minimum installation (without very large efforts to strip
it down).

I also tried to get survex running on a psion PDA but cavern didn't work
for mysterious reasons that we never got to the bottom of.

The short answer is 'if you can install debian on the device then
survex, therion and aven should 'just work', but you may need to mess
with the controls to make it satisfactory, and unless your device is
quite high-powered the graphics-heavy stuff may be too slow to work
usefully.

HTH

Wookey
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