One of the biggest issues in mobile devices today is power management. On the one hand we expect that the device is always responsive, to user input and network events, on the other hand we want all subsystems to be powered (almost) off to save power.

I just got my hands on a Android HTC Dream aka T-mobile G1. Originally I did not want to get any of those "unfree" Linux devices but a customer wanted me to buy and configure it for him so I thought that might be a good opportunity to play with it and accepted the deal. So here comes my report about it...

Looking at GPE and Angström it looks a little bit like application development and cross compilation has been neglected a little bit in the past. Now that people are improving the toolchain targets in OE I decided to start a small project to build some toolchains for Angström based filesystem images on a few devices.

Now we have the first one available: An ARMv4t one, updated to the latest OE standards and basically tested. It is available from kc labs. You can read about some interesting target devices there as well.

The LiMo foundation just announced their new version R2 of their platform specification, though they are not yet available for public consumption from their technical documents download page.

Widgets versus Bling aka rich GUIs

Recently, mostly inspired by the iPhone(tm) GUI, a discussion in user
interface design and the roadmap to new graphical user interfaces burned up
and starts to divide the user and developer communities.

Some think that the rich user interfaces with new user interaction methods
are the one and only new way of user interface presentation and interaction.
This goes along with animations, three demensional effects, transisitons,
object interaction, physical models for realising this kind of interfaces,

Good news for LinuxToGo: We have gained new sponsor! Bytemark Hosting sponsors a virtual server for us. Now we finally have the chance to distribute the load among two devices. Many thanks to Nick Thomas (lupine_85) for the idea and approaching us and his boss Matthew Bloch!

We have updated the server to Debian Lenny and we are going to stay with it for a while. This means that we should have reached a quite stable state apart from the limited server capabilities that lead to some reliability problems lately. The last task in the update chain was updating the kernel to latest Debian 2.6.26 and rebooting the machine.

Currently we have 37 registered projects with 390 users. LinuxToGo serves between 860 GB and 1.25 TB of data every month while the main web service takes up to 560 GB of this. We have more than 30000 different visitors and almost 1.4 million monthly page accesses not counting hits by bots and grabbers. The most traffic causing toplevel domain was '.net' while he only had four hits from '.bn' (Brunei Darussalam). The most poular wiki page belongs to the Ångström project: http://linuxtogo.org/gowiki/Angstrom

Have a nice day and enjoy using LinuxToGo!

Very interesting:
http://www.skytone.net.cn/en/
Pitily it is not a full GPE device nor do they advertise that they use parts of GPE but anyway, they do it!
The Alpha400 they show on their web-page is a MIPS based mini notebook which runs exclusively Linux and is based on a Ingenc Jz4730 CPU - usually used as SOC for media player devices ;)

Like last year some of the projects here are present at LinuxTag fair in Berlin/Germany. The projects GPE, GPE Phone Edition and OpenEmbedded will be at the "Mobile and Embedded" booth at the LinuxTag fair and conference. It takes place at Berlin Expo Center from from May 28th to May 31st, 2008. The projects share the booth 112 (kindly sponsored by Tarent) in hall 7 with several other related projects.
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 LinuxTag fair is one of the biggest Open Source related events in Europe. It is meant to attract all sorts of people interested and involved in Open Source and is a great opportunity for users, developers and business people to get in touch with each other.

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!