Handhelds, Linux and Heros

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…

There are some cool things going at LinuxToGo - maybe the most notable is that the Linux on Smartphones project started to become active after sleeping for more than one year. The basic idea of this project / freesmartphone.org is to create a place for collecting, defining and implementing open standards for Linux driven smartphones. That means doing for mobile phones what freedesktop.org does for the desktop environments. Its quite interesting to take a look - there is quite some content yet.

Finally there is a new project some developers (including me) were waiting for a long time. The mobile-linux project joins efforts of projects porting Linux to all sorts of mobile devices. One important change in contrast to a similar but older project is that mobile-linux aims on merging its work upstream. It does not only provide a GIT repository but also a mailinglist for discussing kernel related topics. It would be cool if some more project joined this initiative in order to get in touch with each other.

There is a new release of gpe-sudoku which includes a lot of fixes and minor improvements. It is supposed to work in a plain GTK (non-Maemo) environment too and the Maemo variant works much better now. Packages for Chinook and Bora are avalilabe from here. Please report bugs!

Enjoy….