Openmoko Community newsletter, October 4th to 19th

[Minh Ha Duong]

Hello everybody,

welcome to the unofficial Openmoko Community newsletter, October 4th to 19th 
issue. The two big news are the launch of opkg.org, an application directory, 
and Openmoko engineering team focusing back to the basics on Improving user 
experience.

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Community_Updates/October_19th%2C_2008#Applications

Contents

    * 1 Images
    * 2 Applications
    * 3 Good fixes and discussed issues
    * 4 Community
    * 5 Outside Openmoko

Images

Things were rather quiet on the distribution front. Rasterman's October 11th 
images (source) were put online. This is not really a distribution, but 
rather a demonstration that illume runs well and is so beautiful, for others 
distros to grab. We also saw daily SHR image builds online, no release yet 
but available for testing. And Qi, the next bootloader, recently got resume 
support.Testing shows that it is much faster than uboot indeed, but no 
release yet either.

Applications

Everybody applauded when Tobias announced http://opkg.org , an online 
directory of applications (think Freshmeat, Tucows...). The database is 
community-driven, everybody can register and index applications. In the flow 
of community developped utilities, I noticed:

    * the initial release of OpenMooCow, a nice, funny and useless bovine 
noise simulator.
    * Optimizations on Rotate. This is an interesting example of competition 
and cooperation (community development, if you prefer), because there are 
many versions being developed in parallel, with ideas jumping across all the 
time.
    * The Gestures GSoC project developper managed to convince his academic 
instructors to let him code on the FreeRunner for his degree. Future 
developments coming at http://AccelSense.org
    * Auxlaunch is a very simple, finger-friendly application launcher and 
window switcher for the Freerunner. It appears when the "AUX" button is 
pressed. 

With respect to porting other applications to our favorite platform, I read 
that Intel's made powertop actually runs on the FreeRunner. This is an very 
handy utility that allows to measure and therefore optimize power usage. 
Also:

    * FBReader an e-book reader programme now available for Debian and 2008.8
    * Sander ported Pingus the free lemmings clone, for OE based distributions 
(it was already available on Debian).
    * In addition to minimo, openmoko-browser2, and midori, we saw a bunch of 
light and fast web browsers announced on the mailing list: Fennec), Dillo 
(ipk), NetSurf and links2. That makes about seven, working more or less well. 
Choice, choice, choice...
    * The same is happening for music players: pythm, openmoko-mediaplayer2, 
qtopia media player, deforaOS-player, qmmp, sonata, quasar. Thomas's K. also 
started a mediaplayer. So far I think that your best friend is mplayer from 
the command line interface (and on 2008.8, I think that mplayer is directly 
connected to OSS, so installing OSS compatibility packages probably help. And 
removing pulseaudio also saves tons of CPU cycles) 

Good fixes and discussed issues

Many good news:

    * There is a fix for ticket 2038 about Qtopia USSD requests, so that 
dialing "*123" or "#4" should work soon.
    * There is a fix for ticket 1024, the GSM keeps reregistering bug, a.k.a. 
bouncing Calypso issue. The workaround is to prevent the modem from entering 
deep sleep, and it has been commited to the QTopia images already.
    * Powersaving patches landed in stable-2.6.26 on October 8th. Note to 
application developpers: the best way to blank the screen to conserve power 
is the fbdev-ioctl method. I think that xset s 5 should do it. Thanks to the 
Harald and the Swisscom research project !
    * OM announced two hires: Ray Chao, to work full-time in Taipei on the 
infrastructure, and Christopher Hall, a very experienced software engineer.
    * Infrastructure-wise, unstable development of OM is moving back to OE. 

Too many bugs remain, see Test reports for example. Most of the grief heard 
these days was about Digital Audio Playing and Wifi. I would like to make an 
unrequested announcement for the sake of the good vertical communication: 
Kernels currently has the APM power management interface is still compiled 
in. This has been deprecated for years and is doomed to go away. Hopefully 
apm -s will still work for suspend, but userspace applications that still use 
the deprecated apm interface SHOULD take action, preferably sooner than 
later.

Community

    * Openmoko's engineers reunited for a 3 weeks workshop in Taipei. They 
decided to focus back on the basics, that is to leave the Installer, 
Locations, Diversity and Settings applications alone for a while. This 
decision was very positively received by everybody. John Lee is assembling 
the engineering task force at OpenMoko for that. He started by initiating a 
thread to hear about what the community expects most urgently. As a result, 
his priorities are posted in the Improving user experience wiki page.
    * Compared to last month, the planet has really taken off. Several 
prolific authors are now regularly posting long, detailed analysis.
    * Risto wrote a wrap-up of the "Lost community" thread. Gratuitous praise 
to him: when someone makes a request on the mailing list, it is indeed a mark 
of good netizenship to summarize the answers on one's blog/wiki like he did. 
These discussions led to more discussions about what would be the job 
description of a community manager and decisions on lowering barriers to 
participation (i.e. access to write priviledges in code repositories) 
happened.
    * I did not see much innovations about cool hardware mods (feel free to 
add to this wiki page !), but an interesting stylus alternative was 
documented. It uses a guitar pick attached to the pouch lanyard.
    * More user groups meetings everywhere in the world. 

Outside Openmoko

    * Linux 2.6.27 released.
    * Pulseaudio released version 0.9.13 with experimental support for 
Bluetooth devices. 

Friendly yours,
Minh