Qt suddenly got interesting again
After Trolltech dropping the ball with the community back in the old days of Opie, I pretty much gave up on Qt (and C++) apart from accepting some contract work, so my C++/Qt skills would not get too rusty. Since my nightmares with getting something fluid out of Gtk+ (back in the Openmoko days), I did not have the chance to do much UI work -- the freesmartphone.org middleware kept me busy enough.
I have been watching Qt progressing though, and ever since they introduced Qt Kinetic and QML it became very interesting for me again. QML looks like EFL's Edje been thought through -- don't get me wrong, Edje was groundbreaking (as most of Rasterman's work) when it made its debut, however in my opinion it got stuck in the middle and never lived up to what I was expecting from it.
Once QML ships with Qt -- hopefully in the next minor or at least major version of Qt, I will get back on doing some FOSS work on application level to complete creating a smart phone stack. That's going to be fun!
Updated Sid Player, Module Player, and Website
New versions of the Sid Player and the Module Player are now available via the AppStore. While Sid Player just received a minor update with some performance tweaks, Module Player received a major content and performance update. Here's the changelog:
- Artwork: Module Player has a blueish tone now which leads to better identification if you also own Sid Player and Pokey Player.
- Performance: Database access has been completely rewritten for improved performance and less impact on the audio engine. It also helps with battery life.
- Database: Module Player now doubles the amount of available songs, we have added 70.000 songs in multiple new formats, such as 669, ABC, AMF, AMS, DBM, DMF, FAR, IT, J2B, MDL, MID, MT2, OKT, PSM, S3M, STM, ULT, UMX, WAV, and XM. The database has also been updated to incorporate new MOD songs uploaded since the last release.
- Authors & Songs: The number of songs per author is now being displayed next to the composer. Since there are so many song formats now, the type of song is shown next to the song title.
- Playlists: Double tapping on a song moves you into the author's view where you can see all songs of said authors. You can shuffle any of the playlists now. The random playlist will come up with new titles on every query.
- Player: The currently played pattern and row is now shown. Release notes longer than the screen width are now presented in old-style scrolltext fashion. We also added a seek bar (#1 feature wish), so you can jump to your favourite parts of the songs. The Oscillator view has been rewritten in OpenGL for improved performance. If you still experience audio glitches, you can turn off the Oscillator in the settings.
I also finally took the time to work on an updated website for our team. Since I do not fancy direct HTML or CSS editing any more (I'm a big fan of frontends of all kinds), I did a small survey on website creation tools. I have settled down on Freeway Pro now, which is really amazing and allows me to realize my layout without having to care about the nitty details.
Update: Sid Player Pro has just been updated as well, receiving all the internal goodies from the Mod Player plus an update to HVSC.52+PSID
F(SO|OS)DEM 2010
Just came back from FOSDEM 2010, which -- after skipping the last incarnation -- was a great inspiring and productive event. The Openmoko devroom we originally requested was declined, however thanks to the initiative of Serdar Dere, it turned out we could snatch a last minute 3 hours timeslot that was left open by the Xorg guys. Very shortly we prepared a schedule and managed to get a nice program which was very well received.
Due to the short notice, we could not manage to create a video recording infrastructure, so I'm afraid this year we can only provide the slides -- which are a notoriously bad substitute for real talks though. We try to improve for next year -- if we can get a devroom again. The pictures you are seeing are courtesy Dr. Nikolaus Schaller from Goldelico, btw. -- thanks!
The FOSDEM team did certainly improve its organization over the last years, I was very pleased to see some of my criticism being taken into account. Apart from the lack of good coffee in Brussels (which the FOSDEM team probably is unguilty for), I can't complain about anything. Even WiFi worked tremendously well on saturday. I still think due to the size of the ever growing interest in this conference that the ULB as location should seriously be reconsidered though. The special service transport on sunday to the main station is a great idea, folks -- thanks a lot! Funnily enough, half of the ICE that took me to/from Frankfurt/Main to Brussels Zuid was filled with hackers, btw. :)
I have met some interesting people working on mobile devices, such as dcordes, leviathan, GNUtoo, cr2, larsc, heinervdm, etc. It's great to see there is still momentum in real mobile FOSS architectures (i.e. something besides the Android, Maemo, or WebOS systems). I'm glad to tell you that this year we will see an exciting breakthrough in freesmartphone.org middleware supporting new platforms, i.e. progress on the HTC Dream and the Palm Pre is looking _very_ well. Stay tuned for more details appearing here soon.
I wish every conference would be like that. The only slightly disappointing thing was the cross-buildsystem-session in the embedded room. Just when I was expecting the discussion about the problems and potential collaboration to start, the time for the session was over. :( Rather than wasting time watching Andy Green telling us that our projects will die soon and we should all start using Fedora/Embedded now, we could have had some progress... Oh well, perhaps next year.
FOSDEM 2010
Due to some lucky coincidences, we got a devroom at this year's FOSDEM. I'll be there, presenting a short overview about the history of the Openmoko project as well as a wrap-up of the latest work on the freesmartphone.org mobile devices middleware.
Hope to see you there!
fso-boot
I'm fed up with booting my Linux-based smartphones like desktop-systems. Two major developments will help me accomplish enormous improvements in boot speed:
- devtmpfs -- kernel support for the /dev file system
- dbus system activation -- on-demand launching of dbus-based services
I'm going to carry out the following two tasks in OE:
- Writing fso-boot, a small executable written in C, which mounts the filesystems, brings up DBus and (optionally) launches X11
- Setting fso-boot as new init process, that way you still have sysvinit and udev in your root file system, but they're not active unless explicitly asked for
I'll do that for the freesmartphone.org adaptation for the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1, Google ADP-1), which I'm running on 2.6.32 (necessary for devtmpfs) -- stay tuned for the first benchmarks.
iPad? I'm loving it!
Sad to see that a lot of people are not getting it. The iPad is a revolutionary device -- it is the manifestation of transit, the transit from the classical desktop paradigm over to the new wave of ubiquitous computing.
Applications like iWork for the iPad and the OmniGroup products are going to make a substantial difference. Software developers will now stop with overloading their apps with features (of which the typical user rarely uses more than 20%), but concentrate on streamlining the human computer interaction instead -- hence improving productivity and... fun with computers!
We -- the LaTe App-Developers -- are embracing change and will create software for the iPad. Exciting times to live in!
Update: Matt Gemmel got it, see his blog post with great insight into the relevance of the iPad.
Update II: Joe Hewitt as well, see his blog post.
Liar's Dice XMas
In-between coding FOSS middleware such as the freesmartphone.org software stack, my colleague and me are working on iPhone OS projects. After a bunch of retro players (Sid Player, Module Player, Pokey Player), we did a small fun game for christmas. Here's the video of us playing it (sorry for the german voices... didn't have time to do sub titles ;)
Liar's Dice is available on the App Store. Enjoy!
Donating my HTC Touch Pro (raph100)
I bought the HTC Touch Pro some months ago in order to port the freesmartphone.org middleware to it and help to raise an end-user distro. While things began very optimistic (i.e. the modem support was completed after just a few weeks), it came to a relative halt pretty soonish afterwards -- because of missing kernel support. Google releasing the kernel source code for the HTC Dream has enabled the HTClinux folks to quickly come up with some very impressive results, but due to the heavy differences in the baseband firmware it did not spare them from carrying out an amazing pile of reverse engineeering -- just like every other anti-vendor-port.
While these guys truly have done great work, I personally think it's not going anywhere soon -- at least not to a point where we have an open GNU/Linux on competitive hardware fully supporting all peripherals of the device. Showstoppers are always Bluetooth, Wifi, Sound, Suspend/Resume, and all the other things where Google didn't care about standard mainline interfaces, but rather decided to put the meat into userland -- stowed away behind a "safe" closed source license.
Anyways, this hope/dream/experiment has ended, hence I'm offering to donate my HTC Touch Pro (raph100) to one of the HTClinux kernel hackers as a last act of supporting this anti-vendor-port. If you think you are qualified, drop me a mail. Meanwhile, I'll continue supporting the Openmoko devices and concentrate on the Palm Pre.
Towards the end of 2009
I just came back from the annual OpenEmbedded Developer Meeting (OEDEM) which happened to be in Cambridge, UK. It was a very productive meeting and we agreed on some important things to move OpenEmbedded forward as a whole. Please see the mailing lists for meeting minutes and summaries. We also elected a new board for the e.V. and despite the grief that led to me leaving the OE core team (which subsequently lead to the dissolving of it), I have volunteered (and been reelected) to serve a 2nd year as board member.
As written in a previous installment of this column, I have dedicated the lion's share of 2009 to the reimplementation of the freesmartphone.org APIs in Vala. Please see the wiki for architectural details, as I don't want to repeat this here. This is an overview of the current status:
fsousaged
fsousaged has been fully completed and is being used for quite a while now in distributions. All of the plugins are working:
- dbus_service: Implementation of resource handling as per org.freesmartphone.Usage.
- lowlevel_kernel26: Low level suspend/resume handling for Linux 2.6.
- lowlevel_openmoko: Low level suspend/resume handling for Openmoko Smartphones GTA01/GTA02.
fsodeviced
fsodeviced has been fully completed, but is not yet being used in any distributions. All of the plugins are working:
- accelerometer: generic accelerometer handling, needs one of the device-specific accelerometer plugins.
- accelerometer_lis302: lis 302 accelerometer support.
- alsa_audio: alsa audio PCM output and routing (scenario) support.
- kernel_idle: system idle notifications.
- kernel_input: system input handling.
- kernel_info: kernel information.
- kernel26_display: display class-device based brightness control.
- kernel26_rtc: realtime clock, wakeup alarm.
- kernel26_leds: LED class-device based brightness control.
- kernel26_powersupply: peripheral power supply control.
- openmoko_powercontrol: device-specific power supply controls for Openmoko devices.
- thinkpad_powercontrol: device-specific power supply controls for IBM Thinkpad devices.
fsotimed
fsotimed is about half-way complete compared to frameworkd. The working plugin is:
- alarm: DBus alarm service as per org.freesmartphone.Time.Alarm.
fsonetworkd
fsonetwork is done with the same level of functionality as in frameworkd. The working plugin is:
- sharing: internet connection sharing.
fsogsmd
fsogsmd has been on hold since end of April due to waiting for more Vala language features. When they finally appeared in September, I picked up where I left and furiosly worked on what i perceive as the prime subsystem of FSO :)
The basic infrastructure is more or less complete now and we cover about 50% of the DBus API as per *org.freesmartphone.GSM.**, i.e. device info, sim access, network registration, sms, and call handling is working. All work has been done in a generic way, i.e. without taking any care of modem specifics yet -- which is what will be my next task before I go on covering the missing API.
fsogpsd
I have added a skeleton of that to the repository and adapted some lower-level classes in libfsotransport to work both for fsogsmd and fsogpsd. I would have done more work, but I'm not keen on implementing the Gypsy API, since I think it's not a particular good DBus API
fsopreferencesd / fsopimd / fsoeventsd
All these have not been started, not even been thinking much about 'em. fsopreferencesd will probably have to wait until dconf / gvariant / gsettings have finally landed in glib. fsopimd is waiting for a redesign of the opimd API. fsoeventsd needs a new architecture, but I have to discuss this with the others before we can start cranking.
2010
will be a very interesting year for Linux on mobile devices, even more so for freesmartphone.org. Due to the lack of someone funding FSO, I will probably not find much time to work on FSO in 2010 -- that's why I'm so furiously working on getting most of it to a state where others can jump in before the end of this year.
Apart from that, I hope we can get FSOSHRCON'10 happening very early in 2010 and uplevel kernel support for some of the more interesting semi-open devices such as the Palm Pre, Nokia N900, and the HTC family. FSO would be more than happy to add device-specific support for this hardware once the kernel is up to par.
Cheers!