Handhelds, Linux and Heros

Yu Wu released a shiny new VMWare image with updated GPE Phone Edition stuff - now the email client application is included and there are several other bits and pieces fixed and updated. You can get the image from here. The release notes and changes are here.

Doesn’t it look promising? :-)

While we are on topic: Philip van Hoof started a project creating an email client for small devices - of course its using Tinymail. Now I just need a little bit of free time - a decent email client for PDAs and cellphones would just rock!

What else do we have? I guess its too much to write about early in the morning. Some things that come to my mind are one nice new toy: A Xybernaut MA-V wearable computer (I found a short description here.) Then we have a heavily updated news aggregator at Linux-To-Go and some new releases like gpe-aerial 0.3.0 which should work with latest Prismstumbler prerelease as its backend and a new release of libgpewidget we should have done quite some time ago.

Time to get a little rest…

Graham built a new and consistent set of GPE packages for the Nokia 770 using MUD including latest bits from SVN. If you want to upgrade please take care to remove all other feeds containing GPE bits because of the changed version numbers. The packages are available from his website. The complete announcement can be found here.

Please test and report issues to the GPE mailinglist or file a bug report at the GPE Bugzilla.

Thank you and keep up the good work!

The unpleasant GPE vs. handhelds.org story continues… since the move to the new hosting location at LinuxToGo in November last year George France from handhelds.org did everything to block information about the fact GPE moved to a new place.

• Some key GPE developers were locked out from handhelds.org
• The old website was restored
• All links to the new website were removed from the old website and from the Wiki
• GPE developers were unsubscribed and banned from the old mailinglist
• The old GPE wiki was locked down so that noone can add a link to the new website and wiki

Unluckily all requests to stop this unfriendly and childish behaviour were ignored. The old website obviously confuses people (one example can be found here) - that’s really what we Open Source developers need for motivation, right :-/

So now again and in public:

George, stop your sensless war against GPE - it is bad for you, it is bad for us and it is bad for the community!

I do not really know if anyone is still interested in this, but would really really love to get back to work instead of wasting my time with fixing damage caused by this useless fight.

Hey I just noticed that it is more than one year ago we started linuxtogo.org! I guess this is the right time to thank all the people who are involved and work on LinuxToGo an on the projects hosted there.

So where are we now?

Currently we have 23 registered projects and 106 users from various countries. The hosted projects include OpenEmbedded, GPE Palmtop Environment, GPE Phone Edition, OpenZaurus, Angström and OPIE II.

The most popular single download is the the gpe-sudoku game binary package which has been downloaded more than 6600 times.

We have the most important services to host Open Source projects such as GForge, SVN, CVS, mailinglists, Bugzilla and some facilities to distribute news and information such as the Planet, web services, the Wiki and a public screenshot service for mobile devices.

The main server is up and running since the project was started:

serenity:~# uptime
11:37:56 up 371 days, 22:04, 1 user, load average: 0.32, 0.87, 1.00


And what next?

I guess the most important task is to get more people involved in Open Source projects for mobile devices and in LinuxToGo itself. But well… another server would be very useful too :-)

The OpenEZX project makes it possible: I have GPE Phone Edition some sort of running on my Motorola A780. The filesystem image is built with OpenEmbedded and does not need any modifications anymore. It is possible to try it without any persistent modification to the A780 - just put the filesystem on a microSD card and boot the kernel using boot_usb. The filesystem and kernel are available from here.

To build your own image you can make use of the patch (to fix the Angstrom configuration) and an excerpt of my local.conf. Everything else is in OpenEmbedded (org.openembedded.dev branch) already.

Known issues and limitations:

1. Touchscreen support in the kernel is still buggy.
2. Buttons except of the power button do not work
3. No power management
4. No support for the modem in our software
5. Poor usability because of lacking softkeys.

Currently there are some screenshots available at http://scap.linuxtogo.org.

Comments? Questions? Don’t hestitate to contact us on the mailinglists (openezx-devel@lists.gnumonks.org is about the kernel and device, gpephone-devel@linuxtogo.org for the userland stuff).