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Return to Stable Hybrid Release.

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This page is a placeholder to get us organized until we can get a build started.

Overview

The Stable Hybrid Release (SHR) is intended to be a combination of the FSO, some of the Openmoko2007.2 GTK software, and the ASU that provides all of the functionality of the 2007.2 software, but with the stability of the FSO and the new GUI toolkits provided by the ASU. It will probably be based on an ASU build, with the FSO software and GTK end-user apps added.

(We're not married to the idea of using the GTK apps, but they already exist and are more-or-less debugged at least on the UI side. If someone knows of a more stable and/or usable app that's appropriate for the OM, let us know by dropping a comment on the Talk tab of this page.)

Follow the project here: SHR Project Homepage

Why SHR exists

This is long and rambling, and maybe more of a tirade than information, but it does give some background on why this project was started. The overview gives, well, the overview, this is more of a deeper examination of the existing releases and why we felt we needed something new.

Feel free to skip this whole section if you already think SHR is a good idea :-)

Why not ASU?

ASU is the distro that OM is putting their main effort into right now. ASU looks very slick, but is very unstable right now, and is likely to be unstable and feature-poor for some time.

Why not 2007.2?

2007.2 is the "old" Openmoko distribution, now unsupported. Unsupported == often broken. Also, neither calls nor suspend/resume ever worked reliably.

Why not Qtopia?

You can also install Qtopia on the phone, once TrollTech puts the images up again :-(

Qtopia is stable, but it doesn't suspend & resume (so the battery life is crap). And you can only build qt apps on Qtopia, which means lots of linux apps you might want to port suddenly got a lot harder to port. And some people just don't like developing for qt.

Also, as far as I know, there is no documented build procedure for Qtopia on Openmoko.

Why not FSO?

FSO is the initiative by Mickey Lauer and crew to create a good D-Bus infrastructure which runs on the neos, among other devices.

FSO is by far the most stable & usable release, if all you want is a phone. (I mean *all*. It just has a dialer right now, not even call history.)

FSO is never intended on its own to be a full image, it's just the infrastructure and a demo app.

Other people are supposed to put a front end on FSO. So that's what we're doing.

Why SHR?

So SHR is FSO, with us doing the necessary work to port the old high-functionality 2007.2 stuff on a stable call platform. We have an adapter from the 2007.2 call service to the FSO call service and we're installing the basic 2007.2 apps on the FSO baseline install.

In theory, it should be very simple, and should give us dialer, contact management, SMS, terminal, media player, gps app, etc. since all those already work on 2007.2. And the dialer should be stable, which it wasn't in 2007.2

First steps

The first pass at making the GTK software use the FSO will involve just creating a gsmd workalike that sends commands to the ophoned dbus api from FSO. mickeyterm is an example of another program that lets you send GSM commands through ophoned.

We want to have a build that is stable, so we'll need some standard way of identifying the latest stable pieces of all the different software in the SHR, as well as a way to identify previous released versions of the SHR.

Interest

Here's a list of people who've expressed an interest in working on the SHR.

How to join

The introductory email can just be a couple of lines if you like. It should include what part would you want to work on, and any special knowledge you have that would relate to the project, e.g. if you are an OE guru or linux kernel geek, matchbox-window manager guru, etc.

Tasks & status

Here's a list of the tasks for the SHR:

Task Status Owner Helping out Last update
Run the build host Have server CPU time and disk space; just need to talk about git branches paulproteus 2008-07-03
phonekit to ophoned adapter Pre-Alpha Ainulindale ferric, Wurp 2008-07-10
Test & label good SHR releases Awaiting builds Kevin Dean Nobody 2008-07-05
Identify packages to go into SHR Pre-alpha Wurp Anyone & everyone 2008-07-12
Identify differences between FSO & 2007.2 that need investigation Pre-alpha Wurp Nobody yet 2008-07-12
Switch FSO to use the 2007.2 matchbox session Pre-alpha Wurp Nobody yet 2008-07-12

Completed tasks:

Task Resolution When resolved
Set up launcher (home) page and document how to add new apps to it The launcher will be the apps tab of openmoko-today2 2008-07-08
Set up projects.openmoko.org project for the patch to apply to FSO to make it SHR Done! SHR Project HomePage 2008-07-08

Statuses:

  • Needs owner! - someone needs to take responsibility for this task
  • Not started - someone has taken responsibility, but hasn't done anything yet...
  • Started - someone has started work, but there is nothing usable yet
  • Alpha - it might work, maybe
  • Beta - it probably works most of the time
  • Maintained - a stable release is out there, working on oddball bugs & new features
  • Done - a stable release is out there, no activity on this task now

List of packages included

From FSO:

  • ophoned
  • preferencesd
  • pimd
  • odeviced
  • lots more...

From 2007.2:

  • TODO
  • lots more...

From ASU:

  • TODO
  • lots more...

Project links

SHR Trac Milestone

IRC conversation about how we're using revision control

From 2007-07-07

12:36 < wurp2> Everything *new* goes on OM projects site
12:36 < Ainulindale> I totally agree
12:36 < wurp2> Updates to 2007.2 apps go back into the home svn
12:36 < Ainulindale> paulproteus: no, you're an external cabal all by yourself
                     :-)
12:36 < cb22> anyone planning on drawing up a roadmap?
12:36 < paulproteus> cb22, We can do that in Trac in fact.
12:36 < wurp2> And changes to the underlying release go as patches into our OE
               branch, yes?
12:36 < paulproteus> (or on the wiki page)
12:36 < paulproteus> wurp2, Right
12:36 < paulproteus> mwester, Sanity-check my terminology where I mess things
                     up!
12:37 < Ainulindale> hmmm fuzzy for me but what should go in OM and what should
                     go in OE ?
12:37 <@mwester> Sure
12:37 <@mwester> What do you mean by OM?
12:37 < paulproteus> Ainulindale, New software we write goes in the
                     projects.openmoko.org.
12:37 <@mwester> right.
12:37 < Ainulindale> Ok so the wrapper for example
12:37 < wurp2> Anything stand-alone goes in OM (projects.openmoko.org)
12:37 < wurp2> yeah
12:37 <@mwester> So we will use projects.openmoko.org for as much as we can,
                 and OE to build the distro.
12:37 < Ainulindale> Sounds right to me
12:37 < wurp2> Great!
12:38 <@mwester> We *will not* use the OM git repo, as that is owned and
                 controlled by Openmoko the company...

Reference Material