Hello,
An unofficial Openmoko Community newsletter for October 20th to November 2nd
is available for your reading and editing pleasure at:
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Community_Updates/November_2nd%2C_2008
Today's headline is: Android is definitely coming to the Neo FreeRunner.
Many talented hackers have been working at it quietly this year, and Koolu
targets a release this November. We have more news from the distributions,
with Qt and FDOM updates, and the testing branch dealing with E repackaging.
The number of applications and utilities is growing, a Doom port is just out!
System-wise, memory timings and bootscripts received impressive
optimizations, and the echo bug and touchscreen jitter bug were patched.
Contents
* 1 Images
* 2 Applications
* 3 Hardware, community and wiki
* 4 System-level improvements
[edit] Images
* Yes, Android is coming to the FreeRunner. Shortly after Open Handset
Alliance announced the launch of Android Open Source Project, Koolu announced
that its Beta port of Android for Freerunner would be available to download
in November 2008. Brian Code is working on it, but he is not alone, Sean
McNeil is there too. I expect that Neo will have mechanical legs before
Christmas.
* FDOM: David et al. released again, announcing that development moved to
a new home. Mirrors added, more needed. FDOM now exists as an installer
script: the FDOMizer. It is meant to be run over an ASU 2008.x image or over
an existing FDOM installation. In my experience, this script worked rather
well, considering it is a first release.
* Qtopia / Qt Extended on FreeRunner: Nokia released version 4.4.2 and a
bugfix 4.3.3-snapshot. Downloads, release notes. There was a filesystem
layout incompatibility between the 4.4.2 image and the latest mwester kernel,
so Hypnotize released a working Qt EXtended 4.4.2 image.
* October 2008 has come and gone, so I guess that we should start
forgetting about 2008.10 and start expecting 2009.11. The showstoppers
buglist is online and weekly testing reports are available.
* The testing image: There has been big changes in E's foundation
libraries upstream, so lots of breakage in Testing as E and illume are being
repackaged. Breakage as in The icons, they are all gone ? That is what
testing is for, so people got up to work and it was fixed in a few days, see
this thread for details about the transition to the new packaging scheme.
* Om2007.2 is not supported anymore. Most bugs in the Trac related to that
distro have been closed with status community. Here is to you, SHR.
* The FSO team is in release mood, we expect another milestone soon.
[edit] Applications
* fso-control. A (suspend, reboot, shutdown) menu designed to pop up with
the POWER button. Uses Python, Edje and frameworkd. release notes and ipk
link.
* A basic Python led and vibrator management utility.
* Sephora settings manager 0.2 alpha 3 released, adds GERMAN localization.
* Mokoko yet another media player.
* NeoTool, a hostside GUI to flash/backup the Neo, was updated.
* Doom port for the Openmoko Freerunner Milestone 1 (Alpha) released. The
thread points out where to the shareware IWAD level description files if you
don't have doom1.wad or doom2.wad around.
* Telephone auto-reply scripts were proposed. Kamil send one that replies
with a not available SMS when one flips the FreeRunner face down. Alex
showcased a project for a full phone firewall stack, with GUI.
* On the same thread, Mickey reminded about the power of oeventsd 's rules
file. This is a user-tweakable rules engine using yaml-syntax to configure
system-wide behaviour on DBus events (what a mouthful !). It was introduced
in FSO Milestones 3 and needs user feedback, and more documentation I guess.
[edit] Hardware, community and wiki
* If you find that the black case is kind of boring, Tobias has a tutorial
on how to use printable self adhesive foil.
* National Taipei University is starting a bunch of academic projects: The
Bicycle Motion Information Displayer, Business Card Exchange system,
Location-based mobile video streaming system, Dancing With the Mobile Phone
* The Tsing Hua OpenLab held a workshop on 10/29, following the three GSoC
interns at OpenMoko Inc.
* The Erlang wiki page deserves a special mention in this newsletter for a
few reasons. First, it received some TLC this week and is now one of the best
articles in our wiki. Second, Erlang is based on concurrent functional
programming, an interesting paradigm that needs more advertising. Third, it's
nice to think that around the FreeRunner's cradle, there is not only Nokia,
Swisscom and Google's electromechanical avatar, but also a sign of Ericsson
research. Fourth, Erlang rocks for reliable soft real-time distributed
telecoms applications and this is where the future is - see what Dash made of
the Neo 1973 platform.
[edit] System-level
