Community Updates/2009-03-06

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Dear community :

Here comes 13th community update. During these two weeks, there are many exciting news here. Openmoko has announced Om 2009 release plan, Gentoo@openmoko team has reached their first milestone for running Gentoo on FreeRunner... etc.

Beside the distribution news, there are many events like FreerunnerMeeting (in Politecnico di Milano University), OSI Tech Days 2009 and Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2009... etc, will be held during sprint time.

Finally, I would like to remind you all that there is nine days left for the registration of FreeRunner programming competition.

Stay tuned. There is more interesting information in this community update.


Period 20, Feb~5, Mar, 2009

Distributions

  • FSO 5.1 has been released. FSO milestone5 to fix some bugs that crept into the release, notably the "not working on bootloaders that mount the root partition read-only".
The release has been built out of the fso/milestone5 OE branch. Get it at http://downloads.freesmartphone.org/fso-stable/milestone5.1/
  • Om2009 release plan - On the release plan, Openmoko is going to put FSO milestone 5.5, the stable kernel, paroli and the new xorg-glamo drivers together and make most stable distro ever. The builds in March will be called Alpha builds, and will receive only partial testing. Start with Beta builds and full testing in April. From then on only critical features and bug fixes will be backported into the branch. At the end of May, release candidates (RC builds) will start generating.
  • SHR New testing released. After some time of inactivity SHR-Testing gets an update. Telephonie should be stable. Testers with positive and negative feedback are very welcome.
Get it at http://build.shr-project.org/shr-testing/images/
  • [[|Qt Extended Improved|Qt Extended]] Discontinued by Nokia. After some months with little to no activity, Nokia announced a final release of Qt Extended on March 5, 2009, afterwards, the product will be discontinued. The final release will be 4.4.3 and maintained for one year. -- QT Extended has been discontinued as a standalone product, to be integrated into QT.
  • fyp release 3.01 available. This version is completely fingerfriendly now.
Gentoo @ Openmoko team announced that they reached the first milestone for running Gentoo on the Freerunner. The goal of our project is to provide a way to cross- and natively compile all packages of the protage tree and feed back our fixes to the official tree.
This mean you can cross- and natively compile a basic system including X, enlightenment, the FSO framework, WLAN tools and many more packages. Some phone GUIs went already into the overlay located at http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/embedded
To get started, please take a look at http://gentoo.mindzoo.de , or visit Gentoo@Openmoko team on the Freenode IRC channel #gentoo-openmoko.
Under this project, you can expect:
- the Gentoo feeling
- forget about version conflicts
- frequent enlightenment updates
- easy integration of new packages (start writing ebuilds yourself, it's trivial!)
- multiple phone stacks
- CHOICE

Applications

New Applications

  • MokoPod - It's an audio software. It can help you retrieve and listen to podcasts.
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Application Updates

GridPad is an alternative input method for entering text with your finger, a Simple Character Recognizer Software. It’s an approximation to a handwriting recognition program, but in the most simply way that you can think.
It's a litle gtk python script that searches the geocaching.com site for caches near your current position or a user specified lattitude and longitude and adds the cache as a poi in tangogps.
The script can now:
  • get gps location from phone
  • user can manually set location
  • user can specify range
  • script can download matching geocaches and add as poi
  • read geocaching.com username and password from configuration file
  • threaded GTK and downloading - but unfortunately no unicode support in search
  • gui input for username and password
it's only tested on shr unstable.
At the new release, you can play the wav files you have recorded with voicenote (or other wav files), and go back to the 1st choice dialog (record or play?) after each action.
If you want to read more, please visit http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Voicenote .
Sephora is a FreeRunner settings manager in PyGtk for XFCE. You can visit its home page to get more information.
  • Neon 0.9.8 released
Changes since 0.9.6 :
  • Smoother scrolling in filesystem browser
  • Added a "scrollbar" in filesystem browser. It doesn't allow to scroll the list, it's used only as an indicator of progression.
  • Window can be rotated now via accelerometers data.
  • Minor fixes and code cleanups
As usual you can get it at : http://projects.openmoko.org/frs/?group_id=239
BEWARE : If your system uses Python 2.6 (not 2.5) like SHR or FSO, you must install alternative package neon_0.9.8-r1_all_py2.6.ipk
Improvements, bugfixes and some new applications
Change :
  • Increase speed (thanks to Helge Hafting patch)
  • Work with TangoGPS default configuration file
weekly update week 10 of 2009 -- Check here to get the details.
CellHunter is version 0.4.2 now. The updates are including bugfixes and improvements of collected data. The database has reached ~850,000 entries with over 16,000 unique cells. 70 teams are hunting for cells.

Tips and Tricks

Recording audio

In order to record audio, you can use special alsa state file and recording applications like Monologue and Voicenote. If you want to get more ideas about how to record audio, You can get more information here.

Flashing MOKO11 to GTA02 Freerunner with uSD-card Image

There's a beta version for flashing MOKO11 to GTA02 Freerunner only.
  • apply `sudo` or use root-terminal according to your taste ;)
  • Insert the uSD in your PC, `umount` all uSD-partitions that might have been automounted (use `mount` or `df -h` to check). Do not use "safely remove" for this.
  • `dd` the image "flash-moko11-2.image" to the physical(!) uSD-device (this will erase all data from your uSD!). `Sync` or `eject <device>`.
  • Insert uSD in your FR, boot from NOR-U-Boot to uSD, wait until green "d_o_n_e" shows on screen (takes some 6min). Remove bat and uSD, or login via ssh. `mickeyterm` will access modem.

Community

  • moko 11 (Calypso GSM modem firmware) considered to be official
Moko11 is considered to be "official". So far, received reports indicate that moko11 did indeed solve the problems it's supposed to address (i.e., lost wakeups and flow control.)
The developer now also would like to know if anything has gone wrong after installing moko11, e.g., if the changes in IO1 handling have introduced new wakeup problems. Everyone who's tried moko11-beta, please reply, either to the list or to Werner in private.
About the draft of moko11, the draft is here.
  • Help developing www.opkg.org
Opkg.org needs some developers to develop some features.
For Opkg.org was not updated for two months, but there are still some features needed, like a better comment system with email notifications, for example. Tobiasdecided to publish the opkg.org source code, this way, anyone who wants to help making www.opkg.org even better than it is today, feel free to contact Tobias.
  • Wiki statistic numbers for February.
The Wiki statistic numbers for February now are avalable on Wiki statistics page now. There are 139,554 Visits, 492,630 Page Views. The top tree popular pages are Main_Page, Distributions and Applications.

Event News

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Announcement: March 2nd, 2009
Registration deadline: March 15th
Submission deadline: March 24th, 2009 07:00 UTC
Required license: GPL v2 or newer
Programming language: c/c++ (no python/bash)
  • 2009-03-11/12 OSiM USA | The Westin San Francisco, Market Street | Openmoko will give a speech
  • 2009-03-12/14 OSI Tech Days 2009 | Chennai Trade Center, INDIA | Rakshat Hooja of IDA Systems will be speaking about Openmoko
  • 2009-03-13 Freerunner Meeting in Politecnico di Milano University (Milan, Italy). Please visite here to get more information.
  • 2009-03-13 Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2009 | Lecture and Seminar Building of the Technical University of Chemnitz|Please visit here to get more information.
  • 2009-03-23/27 Apogee 2009 | Rakshat Hooja of IDA Systems will be speaking about Openmoko
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