Great news from the Openmoko Community

It’s a long time since I’ve written anything about Openmoko Freerunner, the open linux phone . Some nice things have happened very recently in the community so I thought I’d write a little update. Ready? GO!

Community Updates

After Openmoko stopped supporting software development for Openmoko phones and concentrate on producing Freerunner phones and their mysterious ‘project B’, also their support for Community Updates stopped. About a month ago the community took over the task and now the updates are published every second week.

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Community_Updates

Distro poll

There’s a poll open asking you for the distro you use most of your time.

http://doodle.com/sd2c8d8snr23eeqq

Openmoko application showroom

It’s vital for the community to be able to show their coolest apps in an appealing way: screenshot, description, comments etc. Since opkg.org has some major problems, some people got interested in setting up a new site to do this. At the moment the most promising existing platform is apt-portal – and it actually looks very nice and suitable for our needs, and it’s developers are also interested and willing to help Openmoko community.

I believe that a showroom like this will help users to try apps and developers to write apps as they’re able to promote their apps and get comments easily.

https://launchpad.net/apt-portal
http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2009-August/thread.html#53484

Run Glamo, run!!

Glamo is the display accelerator of Freerunner. It’s been an annoyance only making our life more difficult and slowing things done – until now: Thomas White started the race against the flow and writes a working driver for it. This means that one day we will have somekind of graphic acceleration on our Freerunners. What’s cool about that? It makes it easier again to impress other people with Freerunner :)

http://losca.blogspot.com/2009/08/kernel-mode-setting-kms-on-neo.html

Paroli running on SHR

After Openmoko stopped financing software development for Openmoko phones, the development of OM2009 (the next Openmoko-distro) and Paroli (phone application) started suffering, as the guys working on those left the office and started to do something else full-time. I’ve personally suffered from this a lot and today I heard something great: Paroli runs on SHR!

This might attract more people to work on Paroli and give it a new boost.

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Paroli
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Stable_Hybrid_Release

One to rule them all..

To me, being able to run Paroli on SHR means that there’re no reasons to keep OM2009 alive, both being Openembedded-based distributions. See the poll, SHR is what people use. We have a One Distro to Rule Them All.

For a sec this might sound bad but I personally like it a lot and have been waiting for it a looong time. Now we have only one distro in the community that everyone can contribute to instead of competing distros. I believe this can now take us far. I only wish this would’ve happened a loong time ago.

Debian of course will never die and I’m happy about it – I also have Debian on my uSD card. Android, QT, OpenWRT and so on will live their own lives but I don’t expect them to be big on Freerunner in the near future.

Conclusions

After some kind of recession (don’t know, maybe they call it ‘Summer’) the community is finally waking up and things start to happen. Can’t wait to see where we’re in 6 months from now!

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