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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...

Hardware

• Guitar pick stylus Pouch

Hot bugs and most discussed issues

• Wifi
• Digital Audio Playing
• Kernels currently has the APM power management interface is still compiled. This has been deprecated for years and must go away, preferably sooner than later. Hopefully apm -s should still work for suspend, or do we need something else ?
• 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 HaralDd and the Swisscom research project !
• There is a workaround to the GSM keeps reregistering bug, a.k.a. bouncing Calypso issue: prevent the model from entering deep sleep.
• Unstable development of OM is moving back to OE.
• Test reports
• Fix Qtopia USSD requests, so one can dial "*123" or "#4".

Community

• Openmoko's engineering team met for a 3 weeks workshop in Taipei, they decided to focus back on the basics, that is leave the Installer, Locations, Diversity and Settings applications alone for a while.

• The planet got long, detailed informative posts, such as the wrap-up of the "Lost community" thread. When someone makes a request on the mailing list, it is a mark of good netizenship to summarize the answers on one's blog like this (or on the wiki).
• There were discussions on 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.

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Outside Openmoko

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

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