The Foleo was the first embedded Linux device I worked on in my career. When I first joined the team, we were still evaluating software stacks. I'd been recruited out of developer relations at PalmSource by one of my old contacts who had been at Handspring which had then merged with the old Palm hardware group to form palmOne. I'd been supporting devs on Palm OS for several years, but was looking forward to defining a new generation of hardware.
Originally, we'd been looking at using Gtk+ as the UI widget framework with it drawing to the device framebuffer, but it was proving to be heavier. We ended up keeping the glib part of GTK as a system library for data structures, but going with DirectFB as the graphics engine. On top of DirectFB, we took the LiTE widget system, then built our own libraries called Hx and HxUI. The "Hx" name comes from an early code name of the device, "Hollywood". As names got leaked, we'd take on other code names, including McGuffin and Falcon. For a few weeks, the device's boot screen was based on this graphic:
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