The G Palmptop Environment (GPE) project is proud to announce a new release: GPE 2.8 is ready.

We have collected a lot of improvement and many bugfixes for this release to make GPE a more mature and stable framework to run on multiple devices. Due to the move of the project to its new hosting location it took much longer than expected to finish this release. The roadmap provides a small overview about the components that are part of the release.

The most important changes since 2.7 are:

Talking by blogs... if this not already shows the culprit :(

Foreword: I would love to talk to responsible people directly by personal email and not "discuss" this mess in public. But since George France does not reply to my mails and since Russ Nelson has my email address in some kind of ban-list on his server (see [1] below) I have no other choice to comment on this publicly.

So here we go. Russ writes in his blog [2] dated 11th June 2006 titled "Ownership issue..." some quite, um, interesting things:

"Nils Faerber is throwing mudballs in his blog entry entitled Trademark issue...."

The LiPS Forum just released their first set of standards to the public. This includes the LiPS Reference Model, Address Book and Voice Call backends and user interface service specifications which are based on GTK 2.x. The release of additional parts for the version 1.0 standard is planned for this year.

Read the full announcement at the website of the LiPS Forum here.

This is a quite important step for our GPE Phone Edition project which works on an Open Source implementation of these standards and of course for the development of Linux based phones in general.

The shared project booth at Linuxtag was a very good experience again. It looks like Gnome, GPE, G(PE)² and Tinymail form a quite good group to cover a huge scale of different devices and interests. Like every time at LinuxTag we had a nice mixture of visitors from different areas at the booth including users asking for device support, people with nice ideas for extending our applications and interested professionals from companies.

Many thanks to the LinuxTag team, the Gnome people, Nils, Ole and everyone else who was involved in supporting our presence at this event.

Here we have some random images from the event (click to see a larger version):

Do you know that feeling when you feel treated unjust? When someone has done wrong to you and you simply cannot do anything against it?

This is exactly what I am feeling again and again these days ever since I heard about the trademark registrations of handhelds.org especially done by George France. I do not want to repeat the facts, there is a nice artcile about this here:

http://enterprise.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/05/24/157218&tid=41

By now I set any lever in movement I could against this really more than questionable action. I know 100% that George France is wrong in doing what he did.

The projects GPE, Tinymail and GPE Phone Edition will be present with a booth at the LinuxTag fair and conference. It takes place at Berlin Expo Center from from May 30 to June 2, 2007. We share the booth 30 in hall 12 with the Gnome people.
You can expect to see a lot of funky devices running interesting mobile software there as well at the chance to meet some of the developers. We would be happy to meet you at LinuxTag!

The GNOME Project just announced the new GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative (GMAE)
which introduces a new focus on GNOME and related software for mobile devices. It is meant to be a central instance to improve communication and provide coordination for projects, contributors and companies who are involved into mobile device projects.

You can read more about it in the official press release.

There is a new GPE Phone Edition VMWare image available from the projects file release section.

It now includes the email application and and several updates to libraries and the phoneserver application.
The relase notes and changes can be found here.

If you identify bugs in the applications shipped with the image you can file bug reports in the bugtracker.

Enjoy!