Community Updates/2008-10-19

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* I had the impression that the [http://planet.openmoko.org planet] is starting to get really long, detailed informative posts.
 
* I had the impression that the [http://planet.openmoko.org planet] is starting to get really long, detailed informative posts.
 
* Risto wrote a [http://risto.kurppa.fi/blog/discussion-13-openmoko-community-feelings/ wrap-up of the "Lost  community" thread]. Gratuitous praise to him: when someone makes a request on the mailing list, it is indeed a mark of good netizenship to summarize the answers on one's blog/wiki like he did. These discussions led to more discussions about what would be the job description of a community manager and decisions on lowering barriers to participation (i.e. access to write priviledges in code repositories) happened.
 
* Risto wrote a [http://risto.kurppa.fi/blog/discussion-13-openmoko-community-feelings/ wrap-up of the "Lost  community" thread]. Gratuitous praise to him: when someone makes a request on the mailing list, it is indeed a mark of good netizenship to summarize the answers on one's blog/wiki like he did. These discussions led to more discussions about what would be the job description of a community manager and decisions on lowering barriers to participation (i.e. access to write priviledges in code repositories) happened.
* I did not see much innovations about cool hardware mods (feel free to add to this wiki page !), but an interesting stylus alternative was documented. It uses a [[Pouch a guitar pick]] attached to the pouch lanyard.
+
* I did not see much innovations about cool hardware mods (feel free to add to this wiki page !), but an interesting stylus alternative was documented. It uses a [[Pouch| guitar pick]] attached to the pouch lanyard.
  
 
= Outside Openmoko =
 
= Outside Openmoko =

Revision as of 18:06, 19 October 2008

Hello all, welcome to Openmoko Community October 19th newsletter. The big news this time are opkg.org and the new Openmoko engineering team focusing back to the basics on Improving user experience.

Contents

Images

Things were rather quiet on the distribution front. Rasterman's October 11th images (source) were put online. This is not really a distribution, but rather a demonstration that illume runs well and is so beautiful, for others distros to grab. We also saw daily SHR image builds online, no release yet but available for testing. And Qi, the next bootloader, recently got resume support.Testing shows that it is much faster than uboot indeed, but no release yet.

Applications

Everybody applauded when Tobias announced http://opkg.org , an online directory of applications (think Freshmeat, Tucows...). The database is community-driven, everybody can register and index applications. In the flow of community developped utilities, I noticed:

  • the initial release of OpenMooCow, a nice, funny and useless bovine noise simulator.
  • Optimizations on Rotate. This is an interesting example of competition and cooperation, because there are several versions being developed in parallel, with ideas jumping across all the time.
  • The Gestures GSoC project developper managed to convince his academic instructors to let him code on the FreeRunner for his degree. Future developments coming at http://AccelSense.org
  • Auxlaunch is a very simple, finger-friendly application launcher and window switcher for the Freerunner. It appears when the "AUX" button is pressed.

With respect to porting other applications to our favorite platform, I read that powertop actually runs on the FreeRunner. For your information, this is an utility that allows to measure and therefore optimize power usage. Also:

  • FBReader an e-book reader programme now available for Debian and 2008.8
  • Sander ported Pingus the free lemmings clone, for OE based distributions (it was already available on Debian).
  • In addition to minimo, openmoko-browser2, and midori, we had a bunch of light and fast web browsers announced on the mailing list: Fennec), Dillo (ipk), NetSurf and links2. That makes about seven, working more or less well. Choice, choice, choice...

Good fixes and discussed issues

Many good news:

  • There is a fix for ticket 2038 about Qtopia USSD requests, so that dialing "*123" or "#4" should work soon.
  • There is a fix for ticket 1024 GSM keeps reregistering bug, a.k.a. bouncing Calypso issue. The workaround is to prevent the model from entering deep sleep, and it has been commited to the QTopia images already.
  • Powersaving patches landed in stable-2.6.26 on October 8th. Note to application developpers: the best way to blank the screen to conserve power is the fbdev-ioctl method. I think that xset s 5 should do it. Thanks to the Harald and the Swisscom research project !
  • OM announced two hires: Ray Chao, to work full-time in Taipei on the infrastructure, and Christopher Hall, a very experienced software engineer.
  • Infrastructure-wise, unstable development of OM is moving back to OE.

And many bugs still remaining, see Test reports for example. Most of the grief heard these days was about Digital Audio Playing and Wifi. I would like to make an unrequested announcement for the sake of the good vertical communication: Kernels currently has the APM power management interface is still compiled in. This has been deprecated for years and is doomed to go away. Hopefully apm -s will still work for suspend, but userspace applications that still use the deprecated apm interface SHOULD take action, preferably sooner than later.

Community

  • Openmoko's engineering team met for a 3 weeks workshop in Taipei. They decided to focus back on the basics, that is to leave the Installer, Locations, Diversity and Settings applications alone for a while. Then John Lee, who is assembling the engineering task force at OpenMoko for that, started this long thread about what the community expects most urgently. As a result, his priorities are posted in the Improving user experience wiki page.
  • I had the impression that the planet is starting to get really long, detailed informative posts.
  • Risto wrote a wrap-up of the "Lost community" thread. Gratuitous praise to him: when someone makes a request on the mailing list, it is indeed a mark of good netizenship to summarize the answers on one's blog/wiki like he did. These discussions led to more discussions about what would be the job description of a community manager and decisions on lowering barriers to participation (i.e. access to write priviledges in code repositories) happened.
  • I did not see much innovations about cool hardware mods (feel free to add to this wiki page !), but an interesting stylus alternative was documented. It uses a guitar pick attached to the pouch lanyard.

Outside Openmoko

  • Linux 2.6.27 released.
  • Pulseaudio released version 0.9.13 with experimental support for Bluetooth devices.
Personal tools

Hello all, welcome to Openmoko Community October 19th newsletter. The big news this time are opkg.org and the new Openmoko engineering team focusing back to the basics on Improving user experience.

Images

Things were rather quiet on the distribution front. Rasterman's October 11th images (source) were put online. This is not really a distribution, but rather a demonstration that illume runs well and is so beautiful, for others distros to grab. We also saw daily SHR image builds online, no release yet but available for testing. And Qi, the next bootloader, recently got resume support.Testing shows that it is much faster than uboot indeed, but no release yet.

Applications

Everybody applauded when Tobias announced http://opkg.org , an online directory of applications (think Freshmeat, Tucows...). The database is community-driven, everybody can register and index applications. In the flow of community developped utilities, I noticed:

  • the initial release of OpenMooCow, a nice, funny and useless bovine noise simulator.
  • Optimizations on Rotate. This is an interesting example of competition and cooperation, because there are several versions being developed in parallel, with ideas jumping across all the time.
  • The Gestures GSoC project developper managed to convince his academic instructors to let him code on the FreeRunner for his degree. Future developments coming at http://AccelSense.org
  • Auxlaunch is a very simple, finger-friendly application launcher and window switcher for the Freerunner. It appears when the "AUX" button is pressed.

With respect to porting other applications to our favorite platform, I read that powertop actually runs on the FreeRunner. For your information, this is an utility that allows to measure and therefore optimize power usage. Also:

  • FBReader an e-book reader programme now available for Debian and 2008.8
  • Sander ported Pingus the free lemmings clone, for OE based distributions (it was already available on Debian).
  • In addition to minimo, openmoko-browser2, and midori, we had a bunch of light and fast web browsers announced on the mailing list: Fennec), Dillo (ipk), NetSurf and links2. That makes about seven, working more or less well. Choice, choice, choice...

Good fixes and discussed issues

Many good news:

  • There is a fix for ticket 2038 about Qtopia USSD requests, so that dialing "*123" or "#4" should work soon.
  • There is a fix for ticket 1024 GSM keeps reregistering bug, a.k.a. bouncing Calypso issue. The workaround is to prevent the model from entering deep sleep, and it has been commited to the QTopia images already.
  • Powersaving patches landed in stable-2.6.26 on October 8th. Note to application developpers: the best way to blank the screen to conserve power is the fbdev-ioctl method. I think that xset s 5 should do it. Thanks to the Harald and the Swisscom research project !
  • OM announced two hires: Ray Chao, to work full-time in Taipei on the infrastructure, and Christopher Hall, a very experienced software engineer.
  • Infrastructure-wise, unstable development of OM is moving back to OE.

And many bugs still remaining, see Test reports for example. Most of the grief heard these days was about Digital Audio Playing and Wifi. I would like to make an unrequested announcement for the sake of the good vertical communication: Kernels currently has the APM power management interface is still compiled in. This has been deprecated for years and is doomed to go away. Hopefully apm -s will still work for suspend, but userspace applications that still use the deprecated apm interface SHOULD take action, preferably sooner than later.

Community

  • Openmoko's engineering team met for a 3 weeks workshop in Taipei. They decided to focus back on the basics, that is to leave the Installer, Locations, Diversity and Settings applications alone for a while. Then John Lee, who is assembling the engineering task force at OpenMoko for that, started this long thread about what the community expects most urgently. As a result, his priorities are posted in the Improving user experience wiki page.
  • I had the impression that the planet is starting to get really long, detailed informative posts.
  • Risto wrote a wrap-up of the "Lost community" thread. Gratuitous praise to him: when someone makes a request on the mailing list, it is indeed a mark of good netizenship to summarize the answers on one's blog/wiki like he did. These discussions led to more discussions about what would be the job description of a community manager and decisions on lowering barriers to participation (i.e. access to write priviledges in code repositories) happened.
  • I did not see much innovations about cool hardware mods (feel free to add to this wiki page !), but an interesting stylus alternative was documented. It uses a guitar pick attached to the pouch lanyard.

Outside Openmoko

  • Linux 2.6.27 released.
  • Pulseaudio released version 0.9.13 with experimental support for Bluetooth devices.