Random mumblings of ARM developer
Today I finally found some time and watched “Empire of Dreams: The Story of the ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy” movie about how original trilogy was filmed. It is a long (2.5 hours) but interesting document which show some funny episods — I like the one when Peter Mayhew was choosen to play Chewbacca.
Where to find this movie? It is on 4th DVD from “Star Wars: DVD edition”. I think that one day I will finally buy it for myself.
Finally we have a winter here — snowing all day, temperature below 0°C… Nice ;)
During weekend Sean Moss-Pultz from FIC/OpenMoko announced long awaited OpenMoko 2007 RoadMap. What this mean to us, developers/users?
But what this mean to me?
I know about this project since OEDEM 2006 when Mickeyl told us few things about his Super Secret Project™: it will be phone without Irda but with Bluetooth (which was then unknown to be or not in Neo1973), with VGA screen and open source for nearly everything. And the nice part was: everything will be build using OpenEmbedded. About month later there was Open Source in Mobile” conference in Amsterdam where “Mystery Guest” introduced the Neo1973 phone and OpenMoko. First days were interesting — some of us were able to look at OpenMoko source before they discover that WebSVN is not closed ;)
Now I’m waiting for RoadMap Phase 0: Developer Preview. Why? I hope that I am one of those developers which will get Neo1973 phone for free ;D But I also want to look at their sources, look how it works, build it for checking stuff on my desktop or one of palmtops which are on my desk.
Anyway even if I will have to buy this phone during Phase 1: Official Developer Launch then I will gather needed funds and get one to hack, tweak, polish it.
I do not want to miss another popular gadget like I did with Nokia 770…
Wanna see Sean and Neo1973 phone?
From: Matthew Allum @ OpenedHand
Great :) Welcome aboard !
Do I have to write something more?
Today there was a sale in local MediaMarkt. I decided to go there to look how much it was destroyed by wild crowd.
When I was at the shop there were only a bit more people then usual — no signs of wild crowd, no destroyed stuff.. But they had one nice thing (which was also one of reasons why I was there): Samsung 205B Wide LCD monitor for 999 PLN (about 260 EUR) and I bought one.
At home I replaced my Samsung 17” CRT with this new 20” widescreen LCD and booted. 1280x1024 (my usual resolution) was not so good and after edition of xorg.conf I got 1680x1050 resolution and this is it. More space for windows, more space during reading of documents etc.
And all of that without any problems with gfx card — I use ATI x200 integrated into mainboard chipset and closed fglrx driver (did not checked does opensource driver support this resolution but I think that it should).
During Pingwinaria 2007 (15-18 March) I will lecture about OpenEmbedded project. My abstract was accepted and I suppose that opinion about sent paper will arrive to me during next few days.
One of other lectures during event will be about OpenMoko platform (Tomasz Zieliński will talk about it). When I saw this in agenda I decided that I will have to write to him to get some infos so we will not talk about same things. But suprise, suprise — he wrote to me first ;D
BTW — I will translate my article to English and put it online after Pingwinaria.
Yesterday during iPhone discussion I gave URL to OpenMoko phone to some people on IRC. After that I had to answer many questions about it. One of them was Webdesigner and put some critic on colorscheme used on screenshot:
Colorscheme is one of those awful ones. Why grey with orange???
Then I visited OM website and discovered that they started developer program finally. Now I wonder — do I have to write to Mickeyl regarding embedded Linux projects I had contributed to or not…
UPDATE: Koen told me that this info was there from start. So I had to miss it…
Yesterday I got official information that Sharp ended Zaurus line — last production will be in February 2007 and then nothing — no new models, no building of older models. Many people wrote that this is bad thing, that they will miss new toys with Zaurus name…
I am not one of them. Since SL-C3000 (called “spitz”) model I had a feeling that Sharp is not able to create new handheld device for mass market. There was few new things in it but basically it was old clamshell line on steroids. Palmtop built to be used as English<>Japanese dictionary rather then as PDA. Then they released SL-C1000 (“akita)” which was spitz without hard drive (in form of 4GB CompactFlash microdrive) but with 128MB of Flash memory like it was in end of previous clamshell line. Both models were selling quite good and one day Sharp merged Akita and 4GB microdrive and thats how SL-C3100 (“borzoi”) was created. Again nothing new… Some months ago they got out of stock of 4GB cards so SL-C3200 (“terrier”) was created — with 6GB microdrive.
But those models were much worse then other palmtops on market… Windows Mobile devices got Bluetooth as standard, more and more models got WiFi inside (now even 802.11g instead of old 802.11b standard). Sharp did not even tried to compete with them. There were rumours that there was a plan to release SL-C3500 which would get WiFi inside but knowing Sharp it would be some shitty wlan-ng USB stick with drivers lacking WPA and any good support.
Add to it their lack of any support to users… Can you imagine that 2006 models were sold with few years old software created for first Zaurus models? They only did some small modifications to get some of new features supported. Someone told one day:
Sharp should concentrate on building Zaurus models. But they should not touch software — OpenZaurus or pdaX teams do it in much better way.
So I think that it is good that they finally ended Zaurus line — it was visible that they do not have idea which way to go and how to support users of own toys.
BTW: some people asked what will OpenZaurus team do now — we are working on 3.5.5 release for all existing models (except SL-A300 as usual). After release most of us will probably concentrate on fixing bugs, adding software and will move to Ångström distribution as this is future of embedded distros.