Today we have 4th day of OEDEM. Discussed OE Foundation, BitBake development, OE development. Uli Luckas from ROAD company brought their ROAD S101 phone (running Qtopia 2.x as UI). After playing with it I can say that this is interesting device.
Today’s dinner will be sponsored by Tarent, a German company that uses OpenEmbedded. And this time it will be German restaurant not Mexican, Italian or Patagonian.
Today we have 3rd day of OpenEmbedded Developers European Meeting. This year we have not only European developers but also Rodrigo Vivi from Brasil and Philip Balister from USA. After weekend with misc stuff (when most visible was Gumstix hacking) we finally started technical discussions.
There are many things on agenda and they are changing so better check them on OE wiki.
After nearly 2 hours in a bus I managed to get into Berlin/Alexanderplatz and then two S-Bahns and some walking and I came to OEDEM place. Few people in place already, lots of laptops, Neo1973 phones and other toys/gadgets.
Yesterday during evening talk I found out one funny thing — all my trips related to OpenEmbedded was to cities which name starts with “B” letter.
First it was Berlin — first OEDEM (in 2006). Then it was FOSDEM 2007 in Brussels. Latest one was GUADEC 2007 in Birmingham. Next one will be OEDEM 2007 — Berlin again.
Before or after OEDEM I will probably also attend Bromley to visit OpenedHand office but this does not rather count as Bromley is part of London.
Some time ago new kernel hacker joined team of people working on 2.6 kernel for Zaurus machines — Thomas Kunze gave us SD/MMC driver for collie and works on other subsystems to get this machine working. As result collie got added into list of Ångström supported devices and test images were generated.
Also during last time people were asking Koen Kooi when Ångström is going to be released. He usually answered that it depends on OpenZaurus release plans (OZ first).
But we lack developers to work on two distros in one time. Release of OpenZaurus 3.5.4/3.5.4.1 took me few months of work as I had to organize beta testing program, build images, fix bugs, find someone to work on documentation, build feeds. Then due to limited access to main mirror I had to work on upgrades feeds. Those tasks will be split to more people in Ångström.
As a result I was going to tell world that there will be no new OpenZaurus releases ever. But I did not wanted to sound like dictator — I asked other developers on openzaurus-devel ML what they think. There were 3 options:
During week twelve persons replied — no one chosen option 1st or 2nd…
So Ångström is a future for our machines — and many others already supported in OpenEmbedded. End of OpenZaurus does not mean that Zaurus models are obsolete or that users need to switch to pdaXrom or Cacko.
It needs work to create nicely working distribution which will use up-to-date technologies, will base on current software etc. Personally I do not even plan to look at 2.4 kernel for Zaurus any more — it was ‘created’ in such bad way that… no comment
What does OpenZaurus meant to me?
For me it was really nice to have OpenZaurus on each Zaurus model which I had in my hands. It started with SL-5500 collie which I bought for quite big amount of cash (about 2/3 of my month salary), then was C760 donated by Richard Jackson. Later I got SL-5600 and SL-6000 donated by anonymous donor from USA. During OEDEM I got SL-C3000 from Mickeyl and gave him SL-5600 instead. Now SL-C3000 is in Rolf Leggewie hands and SL-6000 waits for developer which would like to work on improving support for it (SL-5600/6000/C3000 are OpenEmbedded project devices).
Thanks to OpenZaurus I started to use OpenEmbedded. First as stupid novice, then advanced user finally one of core developers. Without playing with those systems I would not be the person which I am today. Since I left my previous work as PHP programmer I finally do what I like to do (and I am paid for it).
Without playing with it I would not have all those gadgets/toys which I have here.
I would like to thanks for some persons:
For all time which they spend on getting Zaurus machines supported.
During “weekend” (Thursday — Sunday) I was in Berlin, Germany where OEDEM took place. It was nice to finally meet people whom I know via Internet for years.
From left to right:
We had many discussions about important OpenEmbedded things like problems, policies, creating some kind of OpenEmbedded Foundation for managing domains, trademarks, donations etc. Some of results are already happening:
task-base instead of the old one task-bootstrap to get clean images with just needed packagesipaq-pxa270 machines in favour of hx4700, hx2000 machinesnew mailing lists got created:
– openembedded-issues with information from bugtracker
– openembedded-users for all normal users which are not ready yet for openembedded-devel list
– openembedded-announce for announcing
More stuff will follow soon. I’m going to write documentation about task-base stuff, how to switch distro/machine to use it etc.