April 2009 Archives

Hey everyone,

As unstable has been a lot stabler than testing these last few days, I decided to migrate it to testing. An image will be generated later today, but I strongly encourage you to switch your feeds to testing, or flash the new testing image when it'll be out, as we're probably going to break unstable in the next few days.

For those of you as lazy as me, if you're using one of the latest unstable, the following should do the trick: sed -e 's/unstable/testing/g' /etc/opkg/*

Please don't do that until you see a new image, else I won't account for the result :-)

Hello,

Just wanted you all to know that starting from today, there's is partial Hebrew and Arabic, and full right to left support in SHR.
Ainulindale was kind enough to add a patch I sent him for libevas to the SHR repos, so starting from the next image,
this will be "built-in". (Of course also available as packages).
As for e in general, well the patch has been sent to raster, which will apply it to e when he can.

What's there:
* Full RTL support, RTL renders correctly and not in reverse like it used to.
* Arabic letters are now changed according to context (I tried my best, and gfather said it's fine, though since I don't know Arabic, I didn't do proper QA)
* Hebrew nikkud and Arabic vowels work as well.

What's missing:
* Selection of doesn't work on text that includes RTL.
* Cursor position is off with text that includes RTL.
* Remembering RTL direction over lines.
* Auto alignment option for gui objects.
* No arabic keyboard available (gfather is working on that one).


Now it's time for you to start nationalizing applications and SHR/FSO/Any other distro that uses illume.

Enjoy,
Tom. (TAsn)

Pictures (The keyboard there is just a mock-up for testing, and I know the nikkud is bad, wanted to check "exotic" nikkuds ;] btw, not sure if what I entered in arabic is even a word, since I don't know arabic, though it's the sequence ba ta ra gim):



P.S
Please let me know if you find any bugs/issues.

The ETEN M800 is the next phone after GTA01 and GTA02 which runs the SHR distribution. Currently the whole thing is not in a very usable state. Touchscreen is not working right and many hardware things are missing or not running at the moment like the UMTS modem. But it is a first step to run a full featured linux distribution on top of the M800.
The kernel for the M800 is developed by the Gnufiish project which aims to provide a full featured kernel for the M800 and maybe for other phones of the Glofiish series.

You find the current image and kernel on the buildhost. If you have a M800 try it (you get more details how to run Linux on the M800 in the Gnufiish wiki) and report bugs or try to fix them and submit patches for the kernel and as well for SHR :)

And now a screenshot to show that SHR is really running on the M800:

Hey guys,

As you know, internationalization (phew!) is needed for our software stack. Pau Espin Pedrol had the kindness to translate shr-settings and libframeworkd-phonegui-efl (the library handling the UI of the telephony stack) to spanish and catalan. We took advantage of his translation to reenable the locales generation in unstable. Thus, now, these two translations are available in unstable.

If you are interested in translating these libraries yourself in any language, please refer to http://trac.shr-project.org/trac/wiki/Translating

Meanwhile, thanks a lot Pau :-)

(DISCLAIMER, opinions are my personal ones and not coordinated with SHR people yet)
Raster has fixed the "e eats CPU cycles" bug, so the current unstable should be much nicer from now on. Thanks raster!.
Indeed it is such a nice improvement that I propose to move the current -unstable to  -testing, freeze it and only fix bugs until we are happy with it. This could be a good candidate for the first stable SHR milestone. But this is just my personal opinion, what do people think about it?

I have started a draft release note page in the wiki:
draft release notes that could describe the new -testing (and later -stable) snapshot. Feel free to expand and correct the page.

Ainulindale, do you agree such a plan would be good/feasible? If we make the transition from -unstable to -testing now, we could bake it for some time and during the FSOSHRUDCON'09 you could announce the release of the first -stable milestone ;-).


feedback/input welcome.
spaetz