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Hello everybody,

welcome to the unofficial Openmoko Community newsletter, October 4th to 19th issue The two big news are the launch of [http://opkg.org opkg.org], an application directory, and Openmoko engineering team focusing back to the basics on [[Improving user experience]].


''Traduction en cours ...''
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= Images =

Things were rather quiet on the distribution front. Rasterman's [http://download.enlightenment.org/misc/Illume/Freerunner/2008-10-12/ October 11th images] ([http://trac.enlightenment.org/e/browser/trunk/TMP/oe source]) were put online. This is not really a distribution, but rather a demonstration that illume runs well and is so beautiful, for others distros to grab. We also saw [http://shr.bearstech.com/ daily SHR image builds] online, no release yet but available for testing. And [[Qi]], the next bootloader, recently got resume support.[http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-October/033109.html Testing] shows that it is much faster than uboot indeed, but no release yet either.

= Applications =

Everybody applauded when Tobias announced  http://opkg.org  , an online directory of applications (think Freshmeat, Tucows...). The database is community-driven, everybody can register and index applications. In the flow of community developped utilities, I noticed:
* the initial release of [http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~taw27/openmoko/openmoocow/ OpenMooCow], a nice, funny and useless bovine noise simulator.
* Optimizations on [[Rotate]]. This is an interesting example of competition and cooperation (community development, if you prefer), because there are many versions being developed in parallel, with ideas jumping across all the time.
* The Gestures GSoC project developper managed to convince his academic instructors to let him code on the FreeRunner for his degree. Future developments coming at http://AccelSense.org
* [[Auxlaunch]] is a very simple, finger-friendly application launcher and window switcher for the Freerunner. It appears when the "AUX" button is pressed.

With respect to porting other applications to our favorite platform, I read that Intel's made [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-October/033103.html powertop] actually runs on the FreeRunner. This is an very handy utility that allows to measure and therefore optimize power usage. Also:
* [[FBReader]] an e-book reader programme now available for Debian and 2008.8
* Sander ported [[Sander|Pingus]] the free lemmings clone, for OE based distributions (it was already available on Debian).
* In addition to [[minimo]], openmoko-browser2, and [[midori]], we saw a bunch of light and fast web browsers announced on the mailing list: [http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/feeds/2008/ipk/glibc/armv4t/base/ Fennec]), [http://www.dillo.org/ Dillo] ([http://misc.andi.de1.cc/dillo/dillo_2.0-r0_armv4t.ipk ipk]), [http://www.netsurf-browser.org/ NetSurf] and links2. That makes about seven, working more or less well. Choice, choice, choice...
* The same is happening for music players: pythm, openmoko-mediaplayer2, qtopia media player, deforaOS-player, qmmp, sonata, quasar. Thomas's K. also started a mediaplayer. So far I think that your best friend is mplayer from the command line interface (and on 2008.8, I think that mplayer is directly connected to OSS, so installing OSS compatibility packages probably help. And removing pulseaudio also saves tons of CPU cycles)

= Good fixes and discussed issues =

Many good news:
* There is a fix for ticket [https://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/2038 2038] about Qtopia USSD requests, so that dialing "*123" or "#4" should work soon.
* There is a fix for ticket [http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1024 1024], the GSM keeps reregistering bug, a.k.a. [http://moko.mwester.net/brc.html bouncing Calypso issue]. The workaround is to prevent the modem from entering deep sleep, and it has been commited to the QTopia images already.
* Powersaving patches landed in stable-2.6.26 on October 8th. Note to application developpers: the best way to [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/openmoko-kernel/2008-October/005542.html blank the screen] to conserve power is the fbdev-ioctl method. I think that ''xset s 5'' should do it. Thanks to the Harald and the Swisscom research project !
* OM announced two hires: Ray Chao, to work full-time in Taipei on the infrastructure, and Christopher Hall, a very experienced software engineer.
* Infrastructure-wise, unstable development of OM is moving back to OE.

Too many bugs remain, see [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/002688.html Test reports] for example. Most of the grief heard these days was about Digital Audio Playing and Wifi. I would like to make an unrequested announcement for the sake of the good vertical communication: Kernels currently has the APM power management interface is still compiled in. This has been deprecated for years and is doomed to go away. Hopefully ''apm -s'' will still work for suspend, but userspace applications that still use the deprecated apm interface SHOULD take action, preferably sooner than later.

= Community =
* Openmoko's engineers reunited for a 3 weeks workshop in Taipei. They decided to focus back on the basics, that is to leave the Installer, Locations, Diversity and Settings applications alone for a while. This decision was very positively  received by everybody. John Lee is assembling the engineering task force at OpenMoko for that. He started by initiating a thread to hear about [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-October/033611.html what the community expects most urgently]. As a result, his priorities are posted in the [[Improving user experience]] wiki page.
* Compared to last month, the [http://planet.openmoko.org planet] has really taken off. Several prolific authors are now regularly posting long, detailed analysis.
* Risto wrote a [http://risto.kurppa.fi/blog/discussion-13-openmoko-community-feelings/ wrap-up of the "Lost  community" thread]. Gratuitous praise to him: when someone makes a request on the mailing list, it is indeed a mark of good netizenship to summarize the answers on one's blog/wiki like he did. These discussions led to more discussions about what would be the job description of a community manager and decisions on lowering barriers to participation (i.e. access to write priviledges in code repositories) happened.
* I did not see much innovations about cool hardware mods (feel free to add to this wiki page !), but an interesting stylus alternative was documented. It uses a [[Pouch| guitar pick]] attached to the pouch lanyard.
* More user groups meetings everywhere in the world.

= Outside Openmoko =

* Linux [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-October/033087.html  2.6.27] released.
* Pulseaudio released [http://pulseaudio.org/milestone/0.9.13 version 0.9.13] with experimental support for Bluetooth devices.

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