Howdy
Long time has it been, now a tech-update
KDE4 and Gentoo
It’s the small things in life which are important, like for example, finally figuring out, that just replacing “%d : %n” with “%d : %w” in my Konsole-profile finally also makes Konsole show me the recent package, emerge is compiling in the title-bar (like xterm always does)
OpenMoko
Tomorrow my 16GB µSD card should arrive, on which I’ll install Kubuntu-Mobile, in order to test Plasma-Active on my GTA04
Examina
I’m really working this time on the stuff.
It’s ETHZ matter of a year strechted onto two, so this time, it’s doable… Hopefully…
It’s looks well so far, anyway… 😉
OK, I’m going to play devils adocavte here. All of the following is just my opinion and I am by no means an expert. From what I understand 2007 was dropped because it was GTK only and it was felt that the platform should be more open and allow all toolkits (Qt and E). 2008 pulled lots of stuff from Qtopia in order to turn the freerunner into a useable smartphone as soon as possible. I guess this hasn’t gone a well as was expected but I feel like it is getting there and everybody was warned over and over again that this is a development release and not a replacement for a commercially available smartphone at this stage.Some people really objected to the dropping of the 2007 apps and wanted to keep them so they started the SHR project to keep these apps alive. This has nothing to do with Openmoko Inc.FDOM is just 2008 with extra apps and a few tweeks included, it can be compared to something like mythbuntu (a version of ubuntu using xfce for running mythtv) where optional packages and configuration is done for you to save time in setting up the sort of system you like. It’s not really a fork and will become unnecessary as time goes on.FSO is the future but it is not intended as a full distribution it’s a layer to allow applications to interface easiliy and cleanly with the hardware. In an ideal world this would have been under development from the beginning but it’s easy to criticise with the benefit of hindsight. FSO is also not just about the freerunner it is intended as the model for future hardware (not just from FIC) to allow trivial porting of apps to all FSO compliant phones. I think that the next big release (2009?) will use FSO as the base and be the start of the final Openmoko distribution, but there will always be alternatives, that’s what open-source is all about.Creating a truly open-source phone platform is a monumental task, Openmoko are battling closed-hardware and every user wants something different. It shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone that there has been fragmentation, this project will take years but has the potential to make a real difference to mobile computing and communication.I am not saying that everything is perfect, clearly there has been some in-fighting at OM and good people have come and gone because of it. I’m sure that it’s difficult to get an answer out of OM but that’s probably because there are a couple of dozen of them and thousands of us They want to spend their time fixing bugs and writing code and not answering emails. They don’t have an army of tech-support monkeys like the Nokias of this world to get back to everyone with a personal reply. Yes this is frustrating when you have a simple problem but also understandable if you think about it from their side.OK, I’ve rambled on for long enough.