March 2009 Archives

Hi everyone,

As some of you may have seen on the SHR/FSO mailing lists, we're currently in the process of organizing a convention, dubbed FSOSHRUDCON for Freesmartphone/Stable Hybrid Release Users & Developers Convention.

The purpose of this convention would be to be able to exchange between the two teams, as we are closely working together, and to be able to pinpoint the strengths of what we did, as well as the caveats. The current template agenda includes workshops, talks, as well as some partying for those of you interested in that kind of thing ;-).

So if this kind of event is of interest to you, please go there and add your ideas, as well as when you'd be available.

Hello all, SHR users and devels!

Didier "ptitjes" and I met yesterday to speak about the status of SHR, and also to drink some beers (or maybe was it the other way around, we weren't able to remember that this morning...).

What we ended up with was that we are really happy about what SHR has become! "SHR is great!" was the exact phrasing... and so we'd like to tell you all, users (for how many new stuff you suggested/tested/commented), developers (for all the time you took to add new stuff) and maintainers (for all the time you took to keep that new stuff in running well), on behalf of all the community: Thanks!

To all of you, in order to insist a bit, we really would like to say "Thank You!" so much and tell you how proud we are of such a successful community effort!

So here we are now: we have a testing release up and running. Will we stop adding some new stuff? Of course not! The unstable is made for that and, as before, we need you, and all the community, to speak up and tell us what will be the future of SHR. So we started a list of telephony features missing in SHR, and we'd like everybody to contribute to that list...

This list is here merely in order to be able to talk about what we're able to do with the current status of the distro, and what we would like to do in the near future. Don't be afraid to give us your crazy thoughts here, any idea is good as it's a wishlist. Given that list, we will be able to priorize subjects, build teams to handle these subjects, then implement the solution.

Here is what Didier "ptitjes" and I achieved to write down: (before beers made us speak about other stuff, notably about weird music... :-P)

•  Sending MMS messages
• Advanced message composition with embedding of picture, sound, video (huh!), ascii porn (double huh!)
• Managing PIM data
• Import contacts from diverse source (desktop, directories, web directories search, bluetooth, SIM to PIM...)
• SIP voice calls
• A rule manager UI (which ringtone for which contact/group, which incoming calls to block, in fact pretty much all that is related to events directed from the framework to the user, and how to react to them on a rule basis...)
• A "distro" way to allow the users to build themes for SHR and commit them on a global theme repository, these themes handling all the necessary stuff for the whole phone (GTK, e, illume...)
• ... your ideas here ... (mandatory)
  

Thank you again folks! And keep up the great work,

Didier & Julien.

We have upgraded SHR unstable to the latest and greatest and in that process unfortunately all desktop icons got lost. Well, who cares, I mean we all SSH into our phones to make a phone call anyway, don't we? But somehow it did annoy us.

Kudos to dos1 (of shr-settings fame) for bringing up a patch that we had applied to SHR removing e-wm-utils, a new enlightenment package, that did not work with our old enlightenment version. Now that we upgraded, it proved crucial -- and left us scratching our heads.


Thanks to dos1, we have our icons back. If you have a broken unstable installed, fix it by installing the missing package:

opkg install e-wm-utils

... and for my first blog ever... SHR testing did not see activity for quite some time now. Mainly because there were lots of changes in and around SHR. The new kernel comes to mind... a constant flow of changes in OpenEmbedded which made building difficult from time to time... and inside SHR the restructured EFL frontend from quickdev. That all needed stabilizing.

Now we feel confident that SHR unstable is actually stable enough to be called
testing instead :-)

So, what will happen is that current SHR unstable appears as testing. We will set fixed revisions for the important components like frameworkd and only update those if really needed. Further we will try hard to not break it :-)

The other thing going to happen is unstable being rebased on to a newer EFL (enlightenment) revision. This is going to cause lots of things to break. Don't expect to be able to write SMS or edit contacts... expect it to segfault a lot instead - you have been warned ;)
In unstable we will then go wild to integrate lots of new stuff. Some things which we could put on the table are:

- rewrite of ophonekitd in vala
- switch to current enlightenment
- start integration of opimd
- replace udev with mdev
- base SHR on the new minimal distro config from mickeyl

This has consequences for current users of SHR. First... those of you still using the SHR testing images from last year will have to reflash to get the new testing.

Second, those of you using SHR unstable should change the repo config from unstable
to testing in /etc/opkg/*.conf. Otherwise your phone might brake with the next
opkg upgrade.

One big issue with current SHR is enlightenment still using lots of CPU. We still did not (yet) manage to solve that. One thing you can do to get the CPU usage down is:

a) wait until e started up
b) ssh into your phone
c) mv /usr/share/applications/openmoko-calendar.desktop /tmp
d) mv /tmp/openmoko-calendar.desktop /usr/share/applications

after that e should consume around 0.x% CPU - until next X restart.


Klaus 'mrmoku' Kurzmann