Community Updates/2009-03-20

Revision as of 09:26, 30 March 2009

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Welcome to the 14th community update, covering March 6th ~ 20th, 2009.

As always, there was no shortage of news in the past weeks. Distributions including Om2009, Android and Qt Extended Improved all received their share of updates. The first Openmoko Programming Competition, hosted by Aapo Rantalainen and Risto H. Kurppa, was announced and the winner will now get a prize provided by the community, currently at 314€ and a leather case for Freerunner (39€)! A week later, a second contest was announced by Rakshat Hooja, where the current bounty stands at 125€. Discussions continued on the subjects of cool chess games, browsers on the Neo, and of course, keyboards (we love our keyboards), and much more.

Period 6, Mar ~ 20, Mar, 2009

Distributions

• Om2009 - Openmoko continues its work on the release plan. Members from Paroli, Distribution and FSO met in Chemnitz, Germany to further discuss their commitments to a future release.

• QT Extended moving along as a community project The community created a fork of it and called it Qt Extended Improved:
  • bug tracking system
  • prebuild rootfs images
  • git repository

• Android
  • Koolu has silently been improving Android and prepared a release candidate for koolu-beta4.
    • It features a better installing system (untar the file on an empty sdcard partition and let your freerunner start from sdcard and wait).
    • Integrating Qi
    • Runs fully from NAND, no need for Sdcard anymore
    • Integrating Sean RILD, so it behaves as normal phone
    • Integrating many fixes (also community patches)
  • Koolu has also made a preview koolu-beta1-cupcake image. It has the cupcake features but isn't fully working momentarily, because Koolu is integrating a new code drop from Koolu and the patches from Michael.
  • Freelancer Michael Trimarchi has also built Android images, even Cupcake ones. His builds currently have the most features (suspend + sms + calls + GPRS + onscreen keyboard), like seen in functional tests. This features are beeing merged into koolu-beta1-cupcake for release soon.

• Fyp 3.18 released

Applications

New Applications

• Xboard + GNUChess
  • XBoard is an open source graphical chess user interface for numerous chess engines

• knjMokoCalendar
  • Google Calendar for the Openmoko (unstable)

• knjmokoopkg
  • A package-browser which both creates a SQLite3-database with all packages from the OPKG-cache (enabling fast searches through packages < 1 sec) and is able to install and remove packages. You can also perform updates and upgrades through it.

• gvSIG Mobile 0.11
  • Mobile GIS application.

Application Updates

• Mokometeo 0.2 the small python/GTK application fetching the weather forecast from Yahoo weather pages, has been released with some improvements and bug fixes. Changes that went in are:
  • added some "print" in the code
  • debug the .mokometeo folder ; put the config folder in /home/root/.mokometeo/ instead of /.mokometeo/
  • test if the connection to internet is ok. If not, display question marks
  • backup the data each time data is downloaded and displayed. This data is used on the next Mokometeo startup
  • added the date and time when the data has been downloaded
  • http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Mokometeo

• Fennec Beta 1 Released its twelfth development milestone and the first beta release of the mobile version of Firefox, for testing purposes only. No version for Freerunner yet. More details about this on:
  • http://blog.pavlov.net/2009/03/17/fennec-1-beta-1/
  • http://www.mozilla.org/projects/fennec/1.0b1/releasenotes/
  • https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Build/Fennec

• Orrery 2.5 A new version of the orrery sky-chart program has been released. In addition to several bug fixes, the new version includes support for displaying informal constellations (asterisms like the Big Dipper), a new to-scale display of the Solar System, information about the number of satellites used for the position fix in GPS mode and better support for displaying stars too faint for the unaided eye to see.
  • http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Orrery

• GTick is a metronome application written for GNU/Linux and other UN*X-like operting systems supporting different meters (Even 2/4, 3/4, 4/4 and more) and speeds ranging from 10 to 1000 bpm. It utilizes GTK+ and OSS (ALSA compatible). It is part of the GNU Project.
  • Please test the package and leave some feedback (comment or GTick wikipage)

• GridPad v.2.1 Released

• KnjMokoWifi Released
  • [More information]
• ZOMG! package fixed

Community

• A browser review/comparison study of the best suitable browser
  • Everyone can add test results of the browser compatibility to any of the distributions being used so that we may find the one that has the most potential and can be developed to an actual working browser.

• If anyone is looking for a Chess game on the Neo, you could try Maemo. This might be a good start for the application:
  • http://repository.maemo.org/pool/maemo4.1/free/o/osso-chess-ui/
  • http://repository.maemo.org/pool/maemo4.1/free/g/gnuchess/

• Mid April: GSM buzz-fix party in Braunschweig, Germany Daniel Williams has been glad to perform buzz fixes for phones that needs the fix. In order to gauge interest and plan ahead with respect to ordering Resistors/Capacitors he would like to know how many phones would come. If you are interested and would show up please mail him privately and also give information on how many phones you would bring.

• Also there is another Fix party in Barcelona organized by David Samblas from Tuxbrain. Visit this blog post for more information

• Software.Cofundos.org - Following the programming contest, software.Cofundos.org will help to boost any idea one has in mind and give an opportunity to earn some money for people who have the time/skills you may not have.This is a great platform for discussing and enriching ideas on upcoming/existing projects. You can view only openmoko related projects at openmoko.cofundos.org. A feed for new projects from cofundos.org has been uploaded to Openmoko Planet. Tuxbrain has also started a cofundos.org campaign

• Kustomizer 0.4 released for 2008.12 [1]

• Freerunner For Application Ideas

Competitions

• Announcing the first programming competition for Openmoko phones
  • read the rules

• New application contest organized by Rakshat Hooja 'Call Recorder cum Dictaphone Application for the Freerunner' on cofundus.org. Any one who wishes to contribute their time/skills and also get more details can check the following link:
  • http://www.cofundos.org/project.php?id=154

Event News

• 2009-03-01/03-31 Harry' Openmoko Survey | Please help me with my free software and Openmoko related academic research | Harry Tsai of Chang Gung University

• 2009-03-21/03-22 LibrePlanet conference, Cambridge, MA | John Sullivan and other Openmoko users will be around, if critical mass will be reached, there will be related unconference hacking on Sunday.
• 2009-03-23/27 Apogee 2009 | Rakshat Hooja of IDA Systems will be speaking about Openmoko

• 2009-03-30/04-03 EMBEDDED SYSTEMS CONFERENCE - SILICON VALLEY 2009 | San Jose McEnery Convention Center, California | A huge Openmoko marketing event and Sean's speech

• 2009-04-01/02 Swiss Open Source Software Conference & Exposition | Bern, Switzerland | Openmoko Sean will give a speech

• 2009-04-06/08 CELF Embedded Linux Conference | ELC 2009 San Francisco, California.

• 2009-04-18 Openmoko Fix it Party | Repairing buzz hardware bug live and for free , Barcelona.

• 2009-04-18/19 Open Source Developer's Conference | OSDC will hold in Taipei , Taiwan.