What could be done to improve the OM development process?

Benito openmoko at mv.so36.net
Thu Aug 14 03:17:48 CEST 2008


On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 14:06 (-0700), Russell Sears wrote:
> > It works immediatly with FSO and I could phone while GPRS is on.
> 
> Really?!?  How?  Is there a GUI somewhere, or did you edit the PPP 
> scripts to enter your provider settings?

See http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/GPRS_FSO

The script works flawless here, too.


> I think of FSO as a bear bones linux installation.  It doesn't too
> much, but it's rock-solid, and ready to have new software installed.

So do I and I really appreciate it. What really makes me passionate
about my neo is the possibility to control it completely and know how it
works. FSO gives me much more freedom to "make my own phone" instead of
fighting with pre-stuffed and fancy but slow, unstable and intransparent
environments. The beauty of KISS proves itself.

The only choice I'm not happy with is enlightenment/illume, which I
didn't make friends with. Binary configuration files is a no-no AFAIC,
and also the complexity of the e-universe (efl, eet, ewl, edje, etc)
makes me frown up to now. (I know this wasn't an FSO-specific choice,
but that doesn't make it better.) 

And a second, following complaint: I'd appreciate some more information
for (becoming) developers on illume (and other components). A wiki-stub,
a 2-lines README and a trivial INSTALL-file is somewhat too little for
the introduction to the new and otherwise poorly documented
windowmanager one shall work with from now on (hints welcome). 
My impression is that all the chattiness of users trying to cope with
the different GUIs drowns the attention for the needs of people willing
to participate more actively. At the moment crossing the gap from being
a user to (seriously, not trollingly) taking part in the developing
community needs quite an efford. If there was a little more help or even
guidance in this (technical howtos, code references, man-pages,
dedicated irc-channels, ...) some energy could be invested more
productively.


But in any way: a big Thank You to you FSO-developers! Your choice to
develop and release(!) this "non-distribution" opened space and made
things fun again!


Cheers,
 /Ben




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