OE@FOSDEM – We do not sell keyboards!

2009-02-12 00:40 UTC by Florian Boor

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Last week I went to Brussels to help representing the OpenEmbedded project as FOSDEM. I did not manage to attend all the interesting talks but we had a pretty good time at the OE stand too. Luckily I managed to atted a talk about running Maemo on the BeagleBoard at least. I brought the two ‘projecting peripherals‘ and my BeagleBoard with me which gained quite some interest. I somwhow got the impression that quite a lot of the people at FOSDEM now think that OE does sell keyboards ;-) Just to make this very clear: OpenEmbedded is a community driven project about compiling software for mobile and embedded devices – no hardware sales at all!

OE booth with some devices and visitors

But even if we PICO beamer and laser keyboard are not our key competence these were quite well eyecaters: It was very interesting to watch people using the projected keyboard and beamer and find out what they like about it and to get to know for which needs this set of devices does not fit. Combining these into a single case starts to become a very appealing project. I have a (big) case for an initial test already, but making all components fit into it is not that easy – especially if you do not have time and resoures to make a custom board layout for it and you want GSM network connectivity included as well.

Beagleboard and keyboard engine with parts of the case

My Telit GSM modem evaluation kit would have been nice to use but its too big to fit into the case. I have ordered an UMTS modem with USB connector instead.

But back to OE:

I have to thank all the OE developers who helped to man the booth – most important Phillip (Crofton), Mans (mru) and Graeme (XorA) who where at the booth almost the whole time. And of course there is Atmel – they sponsored some NGW100 evaluation boards for interested OE developers and one for a raffle among our visitors.

Have a good time…

Categories: Devices

Maemo Summit

2008-07-22 22:20 UTC by Florian Boor

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Good news for me… after missing GUADEC and other interesting events it looks like I’ll make it to the first Maemo Summit in Berlin. The list of participants is quite impressive – I guess this will be a really interesting event. Just join us there :-)

I read a few lines about odeviced… anyone else who thinks that using something like this for Maemo might be a goo idea?

I do not have much time left for blogging and coding currently – family and work keep me busy these times. But a few good things are in prgress – OpenSync’s roadmap indicates that they are close to a new release. This will be a much better base for MaemoSync than current SVN trunk. Even GPE makes a little bit of progress. Graham continues fixing various PIM bugs and gpe-memo is close to become ready for its first release.

Have a nice time…

Categories: GPE

LinuxTag 2008 summary

2008-05-31 15:30 UTC by Florian Boor

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Linke every year we had a really good time at LinuxTag! It is always a great event talking to interested users, business people and other developers. For the projects sharing this booth such as MyStep, Jalimo, GPE and OpenEmbedded it was a great success. For me it was the first time representing OpenEmbedded at a fair like this – with good results: We had quite some people who knew OE and asked specific questions and many developers with interest in using it.

LinuxTag always gives a lot of inspiration for new things to do and projects to check out. I know about some interesting software we need in OE soon – things like the Sugar framework for the OLPC and x2go. Other important tasks are to publish a list of evices that are defined in OE metadata and pushing the mobile-linux project forward.

In the Maemo track I had a short talk about GPE applications for Maemo – the slides of my talk can be found here. Unluckily I was not able to attend more of the interesting talks in this track. But I found out that the Mamona people seem to like OpenEmbedded at least :-)

Linuxtag1

The Tarent and Mobile booth right after opening in the morning… it was way more crowded a short time later.

Linuxtag2

Many thanks to all the people organizing LinuxTag and Tarent for booth and the big red sofa for sitting down to write my blog.

Categories: GPE

LinuxTag is (almost) there

2008-05-27 22:00 UTC by Florian Boor

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In a few hours LinuxTag 2008 will open its gates. There is a large booth for mobile and embedded Open Source projects in hall 7b – I’ll be there for OpenEmbedded. GPE is there and right next to us there is the booth of the OpenMoko folks.

Categories: Linux

Using CMake for Maemo development

2008-04-11 22:29 UTC by Florian Boor

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Since OpenSync switched to CMake build system I had to get along with CMake in the Maemo SDK. I have to admit the fun was limited. In fact CMake has some advantages over autotools – most notably: It is much faster. One major drawback is that it is more complicated to use pkg-config with it.

I have never worked with CMake before, but OpenSync had some quite good examples how to check and support additional libraries. So I hacked cmake support for some basic Maemo components (libhildon, libosso) and Maemo-like Debian packages.

My cmake files can be found here:

http://www.kernelconcepts.de/~fuchs/maemo/

CMake itself is in the official extras-devel repository at maemo.org. Just add this line to your sources.list:
deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel chinook free

The package is available for all other SDKs from the same location.

The DpkgDeb.cmake file is based on the updated DpkgDeb.cmake by Mehdi Rabah. The other ones are based on random files found in OpenSync SVN.

Categories: Linux

Maemo Sync packages

2008-04-02 16:14 UTC by Florian Boor

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I have made an installable package for Maemo Sync, but do not expect too much. Its a basic port of the current Multisync-gui to Maemo. It is only tested to so far that the GUI starts up and registeres correctly. The fact that I had to use cmake for building Maemo software caused some headaches here… the quality of the source distribution package is still quite bad.

I also did not decide if I want it to become a project forked from Multisync-gui or to maintained with Multisync-gui adding optional support for Maemo environment. The always changing OpenSync API would be a reason to stay with Multisync-gui, but the fact that I have different opinions about UI design, Glade is involved and cmake are reasons for making it a separate project.

Binary package and sources are located here. You also need the OpenSync packages from Graham’s daily repository.

Another minor improvement of the GPE application packages in this repository is that latest Starling supports OGG playback. You only need to have an OGG plugin for GStreamer installed. The mogg package provides this for example.

Any feedback is welcome – if you manage to sync data with either the command line tool msynctool or using Maemo Sync please drop me a line. I would like to collect information which sync peers work with latest OpenSync and how to set up these.

Enjoy!