Openmoko “April Software Update” (ASU) and Qtopia

Openmoko has been working on some major changes to the software, and you can now take a peak at a very early alpha release.

In the words of Steve; “… this is to give people a sense of the direction, a glimpse of the future and not meant ( at this stage) for specific feedback or bug reports.”

Some highlights of this update:

• Switches the Window Manager from Matchbox to Enlightenment (E17)
• Ported Qtopia to Xorg, so it is possible to run Qtopia, GTK, ELF, and Python applications all at the same time
• Replaced the GTK-based basic phone suite (dialer, contacts, SMS) with ones based on Qtopia

It is important to note that GTK based applications are still fully supported.

An excellent first impression written by Ian Darwin can be found here.

If you have access to Freerunner and want to try it out, you can find the kernel, rootfs, u-boot, and dfu-util here.

Zecke has done some (much? most?) of this work and answers some questions:

Q: What do you mean when you say you worked on “Qtopia packaging”?
A: We are forced to compile Qtopia in one go, but after make install we split that up into a lot of packages. I reordered some files in the packages and created some new ones (e.g. where we want to have app installed but no .desktop file).

Q: You mentoin a resume issue. What issue is that?
A: We have at least two separate issues here.

1. Kernel config (defconfig-gta02) as used by OE will create a kernel that does not resume at all. defconfig-2.6.24 has more debug output which will “solve” this resume issue, so we expect this is some kind of timing issue on resume.
2. The infamous no resume after a while of sleep.

Q: What do you mean by “Fix the ugly icons, I know they are a visual offense.”?
A: The Qtopia icons are SVG but with “convert” of imagemagick it honored the viewbox of the svg and we scaled that image up, in contrast to rendering the svg in the right size.

Why did we decide to replace our basic phone suite? Quoting Kevin Dean:

The work done to port Qtopia to Xorg created a LOT of opportunity for the “Open” part of the Openmoko mission statement to be true. Third party developers have just as much ability to hack as they do with the 2007.1 stack (arguably more so) now that the base includes Qtopia but allows for other languages and toolkits. I think this will be made even easier with the service-based approach that will expose functionality cleanly across those toolkits/languages.

… I recognize the need to get something “finished” in a reasonable time and I infer Sean et al felt the need to go this way.

Sometimes people forget that Openmoko Inc. can’t make hackable phones unless they SELL hackable phones. Hardware isn’t free. Staffing, advertising, fabrication, procurement, shipping, design (et cetera) costs money. I think everyone here can truly respect that, if not like it. I’m happy that Openmoko was able to make a decision that will generate revenue more quickly without compromising the objectives in the first place.

Free Software projects have one major strength – the ability to share. I don’t see collaboration and adaptation to be a bad thing at all. I’m actually kind of glad that Qtopia will be an included part of Openmoko. Including it doesn’t diminish the ability for someone to write the application they would have liked to see as “Openmoko” but it does give people who aren’t writing applications some more functional applications.

> The QTopia apps do have a somewhat more conventional “cell phone” feel to them (see my screenshot of the Contacts “Overview” page here: http://www.darwinsys.com/tmp/contacts1.png).

This is good for a mass market product, I think. Having a hackable phone aimed at end users is a good way to go. For the users who never want to tweak, let it be familiar. For users who are fine hacking, give them the power to do so. With the expansions of Qtopia by the Openmoko development team, I think that balance it being struck.

> in hindsight, building the whole thing from scratch is a daunting task, and something that QTopia has been honing for several years.