Re: [Gretl-users] anybody running gretl on tablets?
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.
Then, assuming you have a working version of libgretl, you'd have to
re-write the user interface pretty much from scratch: our GUI is based on
GTK, which isn't ported to Android (and I suspect isn't portable), so
someone should write an entirely new client in Java; at that point, you
could, and probably should, call it by some other name than gretl, I
suppose.
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Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES)
Università Politecnica delle Marche
(formerly known as Università di Ancona)
r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it
http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti
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