Weekly Engineering News 33/2008
Wolfgang Spraul
wolfgang at openmoko.com
Sun Aug 17 19:51:56 CEST 2008
Hi,
some of the stuff that happened in engineering in Taipei last week:
Monday:
*) The first 25 GTA03 EVB came back from our small-run SMT company in
Taipei. This is the first time the GTA03 design can be tested. Initial
u-boot tests looked good, CPU runs at 533 MHz and SDRAM at 133 MHz.
This board will be tested thoroughly over the next 2 weeks.
Tuesday:
*) Big Om 2008.8 review meeting. Next steps are to adopt a more Debian-
like unstable/testing/stable regime. Simplify branches in OpenEmbedded
from 5 to 3. Use 2 feeds in org.openmoko.dev to build both unstable
(AUTOREV) and testing (fixed revisions).
*) Met with sales people for Audience noise cancelation chips. I am
wondering whether we really need that and wouldn't be better off to
attempt the same in software.
*) Discussion whether we should close projects.openmoko.org for new
submissions and instead recommend code.google.com. After some debate,
we decided that although code.google.com may have technical
advantages, we want to try keeping projects.openmoko.org running for
now. However, we don't have enough resources to improve GForge, the
software behind projects.openmoko.org, and it seems more or less
abandoned. Maybe Mark Shuttleworth fulfills his promise and releases
the sources behind launchpad.net soon ;-)
Wednesday:
*) Shawn tested GPS performance on the new GTA03 EVB. We have upgraded
from ANTARIS 4 to ANTARIS 5, and see much improved performance, as
expected. u-blox did a great job of hiding the many improvements in
their solution from us, so the replacement really worked out of the box.
Thursday:
*) 2 people from Telit visited, and we are excited to hear that the
openess of their documentation is not an accident (hello Samsung), but
part of their business strategy. Let's hope that is true, and we will
take a closer look at their GSM modules, UC864-E etc.
Friday:
*) Sean back from US trip, where he heard good news from Marvell
regarding openess. Maybe we will evaluate some Marvell CPUs, like
Marvell 310.
*) Slashdot found out that you can now run Debian on the Neo
Freerunner (http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?
sid=08/08/16/0037221). We are very excited about that, Debian has
_MANY_ fans at Openmoko. It won't become Openmoko's official
distribution anytime soon, we do believe in the power and flexibility
of OpenEmbedded. However, it's good that there is another option
available, and we will find out which one works better for everyone.
Way to go Debian!
On the software side, we keep improving and fixing bugs across the
board. Expect to see new repositories and lots of bug fixes soon. Also
please keep your contributions coming, patches are very welcome.
Best Regards from Taipei,
Wolfgang
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