Community Updates/2008-11-02

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= Images =
 
= Images =
 
* Yes, [[Android]] is coming to the FreeRunner. Shortly after Open Handset Alliance announced the launch of [http://source.android.com/ Android Open Source Project], Koolu [http://koolu.com/ 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 [http://lists.openmoko.org/nabble.html#nabble-td1361683 is there] too. I expect that Neo will have mechanical legs before Christmas.
 
* Yes, [[Android]] is coming to the FreeRunner. Shortly after Open Handset Alliance announced the launch of [http://source.android.com/ Android Open Source Project], Koolu [http://koolu.com/ 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 [http://lists.openmoko.org/nabble.html#nabble-td1361683 is there] too. I expect that Neo will have mechanical legs before Christmas.
* [[FDOM]]: David et al. [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-October/034219.html 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 the 2008.10 image or over existing FDOM installation. In my experience, this script worked rather well, considering it is a first release.
+
* [[FDOM]]: David et al. [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-October/034219.html 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. [http://qtextended.org/modules/mydownloads/index.php Downloads], [http://doc.trolltech.com/qtextended4.4/release-4-4-2.html release notes]. There were [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-October/034877.html known compatibility issues] between the 4.4.2 image and the version of the mwester kernel available then.
 
* [[Qtopia / Qt Extended on FreeRunner]]: Nokia released version 4.4.2 and a bugfix 4.3.3-snapshot. [http://qtextended.org/modules/mydownloads/index.php Downloads], [http://doc.trolltech.com/qtextended4.4/release-4-4-2.html release notes]. There were [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-October/034877.html known compatibility issues] between the 4.4.2 image and the version of the mwester kernel available then.
* November 2008 has come and gone, so I guess that we should start forgetting about 2008.10 and start expecting 2009.11. The showstoppers [https://docs.openmoko.org/trac/milestone/Om2008.10 buglist] is online and  [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/002935.html weekly testing reports] are available.
+
* October 2008 has come and gone, so I guess that we should start forgetting about 2008.10 and start expecting 2009.11. The showstoppers [https://docs.openmoko.org/trac/milestone/Om2008.10 buglist] is online and  [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/002935.html 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 [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-October/034881.html this thread] for details about the transition to the new packaging scheme.
 
* 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 [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-October/034881.html 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.
 
* 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.

Revision as of 11:57, 3 November 2008

Hello,

welcome to the unofficial Openmoko Community newsletter, October 20th to November 2nd issue. Headline: Android is definitely coming to the Neo FreeRunner. Many talented hackers have been working at it quietly this year, Koolu targets a release this November.

Contents

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 were known compatibility issues between the 4.4.2 image and the version of the mwester kernel available then.
  • 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.

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.

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. Special note from Minh to Tobias and everybody else: please sign (put your name on) and date (or version) everything you publish. Especially when written using the first person.
  • 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.

System-level improvements

  • John Lee's team official bureaucratic name is 'optimization' team, but he prefers Keroro. Here is its status update for first week. They already have impressive boot time improvements (static /dev is a big gain, see Chia-I Wu's experimental fastboot images that get into Illume in about 50 seconds.). They are working on ticket 2071, python loader speed and resume visual feedback. John gave the trac a good lookover and closed more tickets than I can count.
  • Tick merged the fix written by Treviño that applied to qtopia-x11 the Mickey Lauer suggestions for the 'Echo Bug’ ticket 1267 in the git around October 15th, it works, can use more field testing. See also the thread Echo issue on OM2008.08 solved on the community mailing list.
  • He also merged a kernel patch by Dima Kogan that reduces the touchscreen jitter with light presses. See improved touch screen useability.
  • Harald looked at optimizing the NAND memory speed timings on the GTA02: Some initial experiments show that the performance can be easily improved by 41%. However, the actual speed (6.59MBytes/sec) is still much lower than the theoretical maximum read performance of 15.64MBytes/sec. It seems there is more room for improvement inside the MTD layer of the Linux kernel.
  • Finally, uboot is not standing still. Three weeks ago Philipp Hug's patch for booting with an empty battery and Harald's rework of the DFU-upload code were applied. According to this thread, the LEDs in the first FreeRunners shipped use more electricity than they should, especially the red one (See the production history).

Winter is approaching in the Northern Hemisphere. I and everybody in our villages went to the cemetary to celebrate our dead ancestors this week end. I envy those of you who moved Down Under, it's 22°C in Sidney !

Personal tools

Hello,

welcome to the unofficial Openmoko Community newsletter, October 20th to November 2nd issue. Headline: Android is definitely coming to the Neo FreeRunner. Many talented hackers have been working at it quietly this year, Koolu targets a release this November.

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 were known compatibility issues between the 4.4.2 image and the version of the mwester kernel available then.
  • 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.

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.

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. Special note from Minh to Tobias and everybody else: please sign (put your name on) and date (or version) everything you publish. Especially when written using the first person.
  • 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.

System-level improvements

  • John Lee's team official bureaucratic name is 'optimization' team, but he prefers Keroro. Here is its status update for first week. They already have impressive boot time improvements (static /dev is a big gain, see Chia-I Wu's experimental fastboot images that get into Illume in about 50 seconds.). They are working on ticket 2071, python loader speed and resume visual feedback. John gave the trac a good lookover and closed more tickets than I can count.
  • Tick merged the fix written by Treviño that applied to qtopia-x11 the Mickey Lauer suggestions for the 'Echo Bug’ ticket 1267 in the git around October 15th, it works, can use more field testing. See also the thread Echo issue on OM2008.08 solved on the community mailing list.
  • He also merged a kernel patch by Dima Kogan that reduces the touchscreen jitter with light presses. See improved touch screen useability.
  • Harald looked at optimizing the NAND memory speed timings on the GTA02: Some initial experiments show that the performance can be easily improved by 41%. However, the actual speed (6.59MBytes/sec) is still much lower than the theoretical maximum read performance of 15.64MBytes/sec. It seems there is more room for improvement inside the MTD layer of the Linux kernel.
  • Finally, uboot is not standing still. Three weeks ago Philipp Hug's patch for booting with an empty battery and Harald's rework of the DFU-upload code were applied. According to this thread, the LEDs in the first FreeRunners shipped use more electricity than they should, especially the red one (See the production history).

Winter is approaching in the Northern Hemisphere. I and everybody in our villages went to the cemetary to celebrate our dead ancestors this week end. I envy those of you who moved Down Under, it's 22°C in Sidney !