Michael Hall of AllLinuxDevices interviewed Jim Gettys — seminal X developer, and a prominent contributor to the ongoing Open Handhelds development effort at Handhelds.org. Jim discussed the viability of GNOME and KDE on the handheld, the fate of the Compaq Itsy project, and the challenges of porting the X environment to a palmtop platform. Hall writes . . .

“If his name seems familiar, it's probably because it's pretty closely tied to some things that are elemental to the desktop experience for most Linux (and UNIX) users today: he was a primary developer of the X Window System in its infancy, and he's the editor of the HTTP/1.1 specification. He currently works for Compaq, which sponsors handhelds.org, developing Linux for not just the iPAQ, but handhelds in general.”

“ALD: Please describe the sort of work you're doing with open handhelds.”

“JG: The Open Source community has lacked any central focus on handheld and wearable computing: we're trying to provide this focus to the extent we can. There is already a lot of work going on at the base level (e.g. the LinuxCE project), but most of the work will be shifting away from the base operating system (either Linux or BSD) to applications. As the kernels stabilize, more of the work will shift to applications, and we are trying to provide a venue for this work at handhelds.org . . .”

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