XFCE taking the picture
XFCE taking the picture
I did back in college. Mobile computing was just becoming a thing but I was way too hipster (and poor) for a PDA or one of those newfangled “smart phone” devices.
I hacked together a wifi SMS texting gadget following a tutorial on Hack a Day. It ran Debian with Linux kernel 2.6 and was so fun to tinker with.
It had 32 MB of RAM but X used 11 MB of that so you couldn’t really do anything in graphical mode anyway. A shell running GNU screen however only took 4 MB so it was much more usable from the terminal.
I eventually figured out a way to pipe images and even (non accelerated, since it didn’t have a GPU) video from mplayer to write directly into the framebuffer. It was a real bear to get it translated into landscape mode.
I Am Legend in 144p never looked so good.
Even with the terrible specs, I have never loved a phone so much as I loved that little computer