Dear Community,
yes, you discovered us :D
As the team leader of the Neophysis Dev Team I'm proud to announce you a
new distribution for our loved(?) Freerunner.
We started working on it on last September, with the support of the
Italian Telefoninux.org community, and after 6 months (thursday was our
half-birthday :P) we want to share the effort of the 6 core members of
the team with you.
What is Neophysis? It's a sort of Linux from scratch for the Freerunner
(although it could potentially run on any embedded system which runs a
bit of daemons and has libraries as per the following notes), we
re-thought the concept of “distro” aiming at boot speed and phone stability.
To achieve these purposes we started with 3 key points:
- the phone stack should be oFono (reliable, multi-platform, fast)
- a completely cutomized boot sequence to start in 30-50 secs maximum
- a fast and light windowmanager
The first point was the easiest thanks to the oFono team support which
in just 3 months from its born (June 2009) was able to run on the
Calypso modem and, on December, helped us in solving an issue; the
second point was solved thanks to the experience of our system engineers
which customized the entire boot process and achieved a 12 second boot
(from kernel loaded white flash until the X server starting without any
window) on our first test release; third point is currently in hard
development: our developers started taking a very simple WM (Echinus)
and adapted it inside a first monolithic release of the desktop
environment called NDE.
NDE is Qt-based and ATM is a single daemon which consists of the parts
you read in the great review done by the Czech community (thank you very
much guys! :) )
I don't want to bore you with many details, the only thing I'd like to
say is that the rootfs image showed in the review is only an OE build
used for developing, where you'll find additional package previews that
we are going to support in future. You can download the real image
(first alpha version code name: Armeniacum) at this link:
http://neophysis.sourceforge.net/images/armeniacum-nde_20100306.tgz you
can find the kernel inside the /boot dir (the one named _old is a
monolithic kernel which seems to work well)
What you can expect: well, it's in alpha stage, the only working thing
is the dialer for placing and answering calls (no contact-list, just
numbers :P) no SMS (we're working on them ATM), no suspend/resume, it's
a simple phone :D it boots in about 40 seconds with the modem registered
(NO PIN SUPPORTED ATM!!!), it works only with moko11 firmware; to
shutdown, simply push the power button for 8 seconds (read-only
filesystem so you can't break anything).
What's next: who knows :P we're hardly working to achieve a stable phone
system, there are lots of programs in our OE buildsys but we haven't
provided a package manager yet (there is a script to simply install ipk
packages in /opt/bin/ipkmgr.sh)
What we need: Testers, testers, testers and developers :D we have lots
of ideas and very little time; source code of our libraries and daemons
is not yet open to anonymous readers but only to active developers
(C/C++ and Qt for the GUI, ATM)
Well, this is all for now, just a BIG BIG THANK YOU to my team (in
alphabetical order):
- Arus (GUI, Development)
- Djdas (me :) Development, System Engineering)
- LeOS (System Engineering)
- Monto (Development)
- Nicola.mfb (GUI, Development, Brainfuc*ing :D)
- Nippi (Kernel building, Development)
Thank you very much to the Telefoninux Italian community for the ideas,
support, testing, critics and joking.
Last but not least thanks to anyone who will believe in our project and
will want to join us in this new adventure.
Bye.
___
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