GPE Palmtop Environment

GPE (a recursive acronym for GPE Palmtop Environment) is a discontinued graphical user interface environment for handheld computers, such as palmtops and personal digital assistants (PDAs), running some Linux kernel-based operating system. GPE is a complete environment of software components and applications which makes it possible to use a Linux handheld for tasks such as personal information management (PIM), audio playback, email, and web browsing.

GPE is free and open-source software, subject to the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) or the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

GPE is bundled with embedded Linux distributions targeting the following platforms:

In addition, GPE maintainers and the open source community are developing ports for additional devices:

On February 5, 2007, The GPE project announced GPE Phone Edition, a new variant of GPE developed for mobile phones.

GPE does not have any of the GNOME Core Applications, but instead software was written from scratch, tailored to the embedded environment. GPE is based on GTK+, and because GTK+ did not gain support for Wayland until versions 3.10, GPE uses X11 as its windowing system, e.g. with the combination X.Org Server/Matchbox.

The project provides an infrastructure for easy and powerful application development by providing core software such as shared libraries, database schemata, and building on available technology including SQLite, D-BUS, GStreamer and several of the more common standards defined by freedesktop.org.

One of the major goals of the GPE project is to encourage people to work on free software for mobile devices and to experiment with writing a GUI for embedded devices. Some of the applications already developed for GPE include: