Handhelds, Linux and Heros

I have made an installable package for Maemo Sync, but do not expect too much. Its a basic port of the current Multisync-gui to Maemo. It is only tested to so far that the GUI starts up and registeres correctly. The fact that I had to use cmake for building Maemo software caused some headaches here… the quality of the source distribution package is still quite bad.

I also did not decide if I want it to become a project forked from Multisync-gui or to maintained with Multisync-gui adding optional support for Maemo environment. The always changing OpenSync API would be a reason to stay with Multisync-gui, but the fact that I have different opinions about UI design, Glade is involved and cmake are reasons for making it a separate project.

Binary package and sources are located here. You also need the OpenSync packages from Graham’s daily repository.

Another minor improvement of the GPE application packages in this repository is that latest Starling supports OGG playback. You only need to have an OGG plugin for GStreamer installed. The mogg package provides this for example.

Any feedback is welcome - if you manage to sync data with either the command line tool msynctool or using Maemo Sync please drop me a line. I would like to collect information which sync peers work with latest OpenSync and how to set up these.

Enjoy!

LinuxTag 2008 will be great for people interested in mobile and embedded Linux. I do not know about all the projects that will have a booth there, but GPE, GPE Phone Edition, QuantumSTEP and OpenEmbedded will be there at least. The application for a booth for these projects was accepted some days ago.

LinuxTag is one of the largest and most interesting Open Source events in Europe. It is known to be a great forum for meeting all sorts of people interested in Open Source - LinuxTag attracts developers, business people and users in equal measure. It will take place in Berlin from May 28th till May 31st

A big thanks to the LinuxTag people and the booth sponsors for the opportunity to show what we are doing.

For OpenEmbedded event planning we have a wiki page that can be found here.

Some weeks ago the USPTO rejected the GPE trademark again - finally!

This is great news for the GPE project which really suffered from this situation. The latest entries in the ‘prosecution history’ look nice:

2008-02-27 - Notification Of Final Refusal Emailed
2008-02-27 - Final refusal e-mailed
2008-02-27 - Final Refusal Written

The complete attempt by Mr. France to register GPE as his personal trademark is publicly available at the USPTO website. Some background information can be found in this article. The handhelds.org website still claims several trademarks, but the related project become more and more obsolete. The hh.o bootloader is used for ancient hardware only or replaced by U-Boot and ipkg gets replaced by the much better maintained OPKG. Its a little bit sad that the Opie projects are not that active any more though…

I made some progress porting the multisync-gui to Maemo. The idea is to offer an easy to use graphical user interface for synchronizing data between the Maemo based tablets and other devices. The OpenSync framework that is used offers several plugins for interfacing data sources already. The most interesting ones are the two SyncML ones (HTTP server and client) and the GPE plugin we can use for the PIM applications on the Maemo device.

Currently it is far from beeing useful, but there are some windows to make screenshots now :-) The first thing I want to archieve is to be able to sync PIM data from a Series60 cellphone.

Speaking about Series60 - I received my Forum Nokia Champion diploma today which came with a great target device for syncing experiments :) Many thanks to Nokia for this nice reward and for the great Forum Nokia Champion program and to Nils who suggested me for it!

Did I ever complain about the fact that days are too short to write about interesting things? Time to do so… but well, finally I managed to write a short summary about latest updates:

Thanks to Nora we have a major improvement of the design of the GPE website. I even managed to update the PDA image on the index page last week. GPE is going to work on Maemo Chinook as soon as it is ready I guess - Graham and Christoph are doing a good job sorting out the remaining issues and building new binary packages. I’ll work on this a little bit soon I guess, I’ll get a N810 from the Maemo device program as well.

The new kernel concepts website is online now and finally has both German and English language support as well as a much better look&feel and a nice new shop. The only major task remaining is the English translation of all the shop contents.

There are some more updates… family updates, workstation upgrade (Intellistation M-Pro to Z-Pro) and a lot of minor updates, but nothing that is really relevant to the public :)

Have a good time…

I got a nice loveletter from Mr. France of handhelds.org today - I do not think that I should quote him here ;-) But its a good reason to point interested people to two links. The first one is the letter of the USPTO in response to the GPE trademark application from 25. of June. A short summary of that letter is that hey did not accept the screenshot of the old hh.o GPE website as proof for GPE beeing used in commerce by hh.o and request a better specimen for a “GPE product”.

The second link is the page describing handhelds.org itself. The section “What we do not provide” gives us some information that hh.o does not sell any products - no hardware, no software and they do not even provide support. (In the case this page has some “accident” or suddenly changes I have a nice screenshot I can provide.)

So what’s the point here? Is there a secret hh.o product that suddenly pops up to fulfill the requirements for a trademark?

There are more reasons why this whole trademark story smells fishy:

• The date for the first use in commerce stated in the trademark application is a long time before hh.o Inc. was founded, at a time the platform was part of the CRL and the domain belonged to Kelly Martin. So who did this business? Compaq?
• Even if the hh.o website tells us that hh.o owns the GPE trademark this is not entirely true: The trademark was filed by George France personally and not by the non-profit handhelds.org Inc.
• Mr. France was never involved in GPE itself, only in administrating the servers used by GPE. Noone ever “donated” GPE to anyone and he simply has no right to claim GPE for himself.

Someone came up with the argument GPE was forked and did never move to LinuxToGo when this dispute started… well my answer was that future will give us clue about which of these opinions is right. From the time we moved till I was unsubscribed from the old GPE commits mailinglist today there was a single mail on this list - caused by Mr. France himself removing a file from the GPE CVS repository. I do not think that any honest person is able to speak about a fork in this case…

Graham announced a set of stable GPE binary packages for both Nokia 770 and N800 (the Gregale and Bora distributions). I just tried the Bora packages and can confirm that the packages seem to be fine. I have updated my install files for easy installation of all GPE components both from stable and experimental repository. These can be found here. Please don’t forget that you have to add the SDK feed before installing the applications - there is an install file for it too.

Many thanks for the packages and happy hacking!

 Update:  There are more binary packages avalilable: The Ångström distribution has updated GPE packages with all GPE 2.8 components  in its unstable feed now.

The release 2.8 of GPE is complete and available for download. The new release comes with a large number of bugfixes and improvements such as an improved calendar, many fixed import/export and synchronisation issues as well as support for Maemo in additional components like Starling (the new audio player) and gpe-filemanager.

The full announcement can be found here.

Many thanks to all the contributors that made this release possible!

Enjoy… and happy hacking :-)

Its quite some time ago since I managed to write down some lines about what’s going on here… so here a few bits that might be interesting in a few lines:

My open source activities are currently focused on getting some releases out in order to prepare new releases of GPE and GPE Phone edition. Today I released gpe-applauncher 0.9 which comes with one important new feature: Easy to use hotkey management. You can define applications to be launched on a certain keypress or internal functions to be triggered in a simple ini-like configuration file. That makes it much easier to adapt gpe-applauncher to various devices with all different button layouts.

Another activity is playing around with different UIs for gpe-applauncher - I hacked a widget for an extremely simple list-based launcher, but I’m not yet happy with it. You should be able to guess from the screenshot how it is intended to work:

Sorry no BLING yet, but maybe some time in future… ;-)

Another one of todays releases is machined which supplies device specific data (currently only battery and charger information) via DBus to applications. I guess I’ll add some more features… but it is not intended to replace HAL - its meant to be a specialized tool for G(PE)² and maybe GPE too. The main focus of machined is to keep it small and simple.

Apart from these releases I’m trying to get rid of a real monster: A DEC LPS20 turbo printserver… if someone is interested in spare parts for such a machine, please let me know before Wednesday. And no, there is no chance that I ship this one anywhere:-)

Some more nice things that happened lately:

Graham built up to date Maemo (770 and N800) packages from GPE SVN. They can be found here. These include gpe-filemanager and Starling (the GPE audio player) now as well as latest libmimedir.

Goxboxlive published an experimental G(PE)² image for the HTC Universal which is available here together with quite al

After several unpleasant topics I have good news again:

The LiPS Forum just released their first set of standards to the public. These include the LiPS Reference Model, Address Book and Voice Call backends and user interface service specifications. The most interesting fact here is that these are based on… GTK 2.x.
The full announcement can be found at the website of the LiPS Forum here.

This is a quite important step for our GPE Phone Edition project which works on an Open Source implementation of these standards and of course for the development of Linux based phones in general too.

LiPS is an industry consortium which defines standards for mobile phones based on Linux and related Open Source solutions. In the current members list we find some quite well known companies in the Open Source landscape.