Wish List
From Openmoko
This article is a place to collect various thoughts about OpenMoko.
Contents |
Development Related
Painless SDK installation & Setup
Our goal should be a completely painless setup for somebody wanted to develop using OpenMoko
- one command for installation (apt-get install openmoko)
- one command to start Xnest (openmoko-xephyr?)
- one command to start an i386 shell (openmoko-386-shell)
- one command to start an armel shell (openmoko-armel-shell)
No extra configuration required.
Platform Related
Community Images
In the future there could be complete, unofficial "product images" that are created by the community, for example maybe one that incorporates only free software (in the GNU or OSI sense). Or images build with a particular niche market in mind -- a student for example.
Software Related
Printing Support
It would be really neat to be able to print over either bluetooth or USB. I could imagine wanted to print:
- Notes
- Maps
- Calendars
- ...
Cups contains a bluetooth printing backend, so (in theory) once you have your data in postscript format, you could hand it to cups and it'll do the rest. In practice, it depends on
- GTK+'s printing support
- Making cups run on a really small system
NOTE: GTK+'s printing support seems to be very immature in 2.6 (which we need to use for some time). Gtk+ 2.10 contains much better printing support -- once we can use this, it should be more easy. |
There's always the possibility to render postscript ourselves, but this is not a piece of cake -- in general, printing is much harder than one would imagine.
Further details:
- http://groups.osdl.org/apps/group_public/download.php/2205/print-summit-gtk.pdf#search=%22gtk%2B%20printing%20API%22
- http://www.gnome.org/~alexl/presentations/guadec2006-printing.pdf#search=%22gtk%2B%20printing%20API%22
- http://www.j5live.com/?p=204
Python Bindings
Python bindings seem to be a commonly requested feature.
User:Mickey says, "They are kind of usable on the Nokia 770, but it's at the lower end of being bearable. We should keep this in mind -- Gtk+ already comes with Python Bindings, so we "just" would need to wrap libmoko*. I would prefer to leave this to the community do though, since it doesn't make sense to start wrapping the API until we have a stable API -- and I can imagine it will take us a couple of months after going open until we can start with stabilizing the libmoko API."
C++ Bindings
There is a whole skilled C++ community coming from the Qtopia and Opie projects. If we would consider basing OpenMoko C++ Bindings on Gtkmm, then we could drag these guys in.
Qt Integration
The Trolltech folks have a great widget library. I'd like to interface OpenMoko with Qt4, so that we can write Qt4 applications for the phone which don't look alienated.