On Thu, 9 Jan 2014, Sven Schreiber wrote:

> Am 09.01.2014 11:28, schrieb Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti:
>> On Thu, 9 Jan 2014, Sven Schreiber wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> has anybody out there tried to run gretl on a tablet device? The general
>>> idea is of course not new, but now there are Windows tablets appearing
>>> with Intel Atom processors and apparently regular Windows versions (not
>>> the earlier embedded variant), so it would seem like being as easy as on
>>> a desktop/laptop.
>>>
>>> Obviously it would be even more interesting to do it on some kind of
>>> Linux (Android, FirefoxOS, Ubuntu, etc.), but as mentioned before, I
>>> think the necessary software ingredients are still missing on those
>>> platforms. (Of course, if anybody has counterexamples we would all like
>>> to hear them...)
>>
>> The lion's share of the tablet OS market belongs to iOS and Android. I
>> can't speak about iOS, but porting gretl to Android would be quite a
>> feat. First, you'd have to port the libgretl library; I understand there
>> is some way to use gcc to cross-compile for the ARM platform, but then
>> one should find (or build from source) all the libraries libgretl needs:
>> lapack, blas, fftw3... On the other hand, apparently somenoe did manage
>> to port Octave to Android, so it would seem that there's some hope on
>> that front. Still, it wouldn't be easy.
>>
>
> Exactly. That's why it sounds attractive to me have to have a regular
> x86-style CPU (Atom) in a tablet, as in the Dell Venue (just an
> example), instead of ARM. I guess that it would even be possible to load
> a standard Linux distro on them. Maybe even dual-boot??

I've thought (to a limited extent) about this sort of thing, and I 
came to the conclusion that there's nothing useful to be done right 
now.

A determined geek could get gretlcli running on just about any 
modern device (from raspberry pi on up, and including ARM). But the 
GUI is another matter, for two reasons: (1) gtk is not available for 
(and/or would not be permitted on) the devices one might want to 
target, and (2) even if gtk were available, gretl's desktop-type 
interface is just not right for use on tablet / smartphone / toaster 
/ whatever.

My motivation to write a touch GUI for gretl in Java or iOS is zero 
but if anyone else wants to try I'll be happy to make encouraging 
noises and help from time to time, to the extent I can.

Allin