My Universal is on Debian Lenny / Titchy Mobile again and it is working great (of course), even X is working. Debian is a nice distribution, and I really like it, since I first tried it. But there was one thing I did not like since that first time: relatively old packages—I prefer to be relatively near to bleeding edge, if there is a new release, I want to try it out soon.

GPE in Debian is still 2.6; which means it is quite old (2.7 was released in early 2006, unstable packages aren't newer), and that makes it much less interesting.

Screenshot of Titchy Mobile: running GPE Screnshot Titchy Mobile running Hildon

And it looks weird as you can see on the picture, matchbox-desktop seems to be taken from poky—because poky's sago looks much like that. As I prefer to have some folders in the background, I am now running icewm which is nice and fast.

BTW: I tried to install hildon (Maemo's' UI), but apparently, there are not all packages—the interface looked horrible (lower image).

Another problem in Debian are browsers with a small footprint—I could not find a midori package yet, nor a gpe-mini-browser package. I chose epiphany-webkit, as I like webkit a lot, but it is to thick to be usable—that's why I use dillo now, which runs fast, though it doesn't render todays websites well. But it isn't much worse than WM6s' IE and pretty fast—not bad.

The same issue with special or adjusted apps, like abiword for embedded devices, with another UI, no printing support but many import filters to edit or at least view documents on the go. Nothing of this in Debian—but hey, it can't contain everything.

I think I'll have to compile all this stuff myself, which will be a nice experience, but I think it is worth doing it as vpnc works and I can use HTC Universal as a micro notebook (smaller than EEE, UMTS, Touchscreen, longer lasting battery ;) ).

And to sum it all up: New kernel would be nice, improvements on power management (show batterys' power) and wifi are very welcome, maybe a easy to setup easy to use graphical phone app (I think about using zenity, xdialog or something like that to work with htcunid like whiptail does).