This was nice!

Three days of meetings at the J.J.Pickle Research Center of IBM at Austin, Texas USA.
A lot of groups of the Linux ecosystem met, some kernel guys, desktop guys, Linux printing folks, power management interested and also a complete track of Linux on mobile devices.

With almost every meeting and presentation mobile Linux was at least mentioned once. This is quite amazing!

The freesmartphone.org project offers a platform for discussion and implementation of open standards for Linux based smartphones.
Discussions for several standards such as an open telephony API have started already and the the first pieces of code appeared in the subversion repository. The main website has a wiki providing information about the project and for collecting input for the ongoing projects. If you want to follow the development or intend to participate in the discussions you should take a look at the project page which has information about the development progress and available resources such as mailinglists and the SVN repository.

A set of useful GPE applications is available for Maemo 4.0 Chinook which runs on th Nokia N800 and N810 Internet Tablet devices. Graham Cobb did a magnificant job updating the applications, fixing various issues and building binary packages.

This is GPE-Contacts in use on a N810 (click to enlarge).

Find out more:

The Maemo project just released a great set of training material for Maemo 4.x. It covers most of the important topics for creating software for mobile devices. Even if it is quite specific for Maemo it contains a lot of information interesting both for beginners who get in touch with Linux software development the first time and for experienced programmers who want to extend their skills for creating high quality mobile device software.

The training material consists of three parts:

The LiPS forum just announced a release of additional standards that complete the LiPS 1.0 specifications. The most interesting part of the new release are the telephony API standards which are the key focus of LiPS.
The archive containg the full standard release can be found here.

LiPS is an industry consortium which defines standards for mobile phones based on Linux and related Open Source solutions. In the current members list we find some quite well known companies in the Open Source landscape.

LinuxToGo now supports GIT repositories for projects and personal use. This is going to be very useful for Linux Kernel projects which want to stay in sync with upstream Linux development.
GIT is set up and running as well as GITweb which is available at http://git.linuxtogo.org.

The GPE project website has a new and improved design now. The layout is the same as before, so all links should be still valid.

Many thanks to Nóra Demeter for this great contribution!

Finally something positive to report!
Florian just uploaded installable images of an Angstrom based distribution with GPE Phone Edition:

http://linuxtogo.org/~florian/index.php?path=gpepe%2Ffic-gta01/

And here is a screen shot:

http://scap.linuxtogo.org/files/a477b5cf7d0f4b795e6cccfaf550eaf5.png

Cool!
We were even able to make our first phone calls with it ;)
Very nice.

Pleas try it and give feedback!

No further comment:


Return-path:
Envelope-to: nils.faerber@kernelconcepts.de
Delivery-date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 07:47:34 +0200
Received: from [128.31.0.25] (helo=handhelds.org)
by mail.kernelconcepts.de with esmtp (Exim 4.63)
(envelope-from )
id 1INMaU-0004Bu-Fr; Tue, 21 Aug 2007 07:47:34 +0200
Received: by handhelds.org (Postfix, from userid 422)
id 3A615DC580; Tue, 21 Aug 2007 01:37:41 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from localhost (h7.handhelds.org [127.0.0.1])
by handhelds.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D6E6ADC57D;
Tue, 21 Aug 2007 01:37:40 -0400 (EDT)