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Hildon

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Hildon
Hildon running in QEMU
Hildon running in QEMU
Name Hildon
Graphics stack X11
Toolkit GTK+2, WIP: GTK+3
In postmarketOS
Package postmarketos-ui-hildon
Status Available

This is the desktop from Maemo, which is a Debian-based distribution, that originally ran on the N900.
We do not have a postmarketos-ui-hildon yet (but that should be easy to make, look at postmarketos-ui-weston for reference if you're interested, dear reader).

Installation instructions

In pmbootstrap init, select hildon as user interface, then do the installation as usually. When running postmarketOS, it should boot automatically into Hildon now!

Running

Note These instructions are outdated, as we have postmarketos-ui-hildon now. Please adjust as necessary, then remove this note.

hildon-desktop can be run in a horizontal view only so create a ~/.xinitrc with the following contents:

if which dbus-launch >/dev/null && test -z "$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS"; then
    eval `dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session`
fi
export LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
xrandr -o left
xinput set-prop 'Your touchscreen name' 'Coordinate Transformation Matrix' 0 -1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1
exec hildon-desktop

'Your touchscreen name' should be your touchscreen name. You can find out your touchscreen name by running sudo libinput list-devices. hildon-desktop can then be started by running startx. To run programs you need to export DISPLAY=:0. To set it by default edit sudo nano /etc/profile.

Rotate screen when using fbdev driver

In order to rotate the screen when using the framebuffer, you need to create this file:

/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/1-fbdev.conf

Section "Device"
  Identifier "LCD"
  Driver "fbdev"
  Option "Rotate" "CW"
EndSection

reference: https://www.x.org/archive//X11R6.8.0/doc/fbdev.4.html

WIP: Possible fix for performance problems

Hildon renders everything on the GPU, which is terribly slow when we have to resort to software rendering. At least on the N900 it looks like a slideshow. The GTK+3 version won't improve this, as it also uses Clutter for rendering. However, we should be able to improve the situation by replacing the OpenGL stuff, that mesa currently handles, with a faster software implementation from TinyGLES and related libraries.

Current stack:
(hardware) - mesa - cogl - clutter - hildon

New stack:
(hardware) - tinygles - glshim - cogl - clutter - hildon

It makes sense to run cogl demos with tinygles before trying anything hildon or clutter related, as Clutter depends on cogl.

More information:

See also