OpenMoko and OpenEZX at Mobile Developer Days 2007
The Mobile Developer Days are a new conference aiming to create a platform where developers, network operators, service providers, and mobile manufactures can exchange their ideas and visions in the field of mobile communication. This year was the first shot at what is hoped to be an annual event.
I was invited to give a presentation about the OpenMoko project and the FIC Neo1973 mobile phone. Stefan Schmidt was invited to present the OpenEZX project. Besides performing our talks, Stefan and me installed a kind of an ad-hoc lab in the lobby of the venue at Aalborg University where we worked on OpenMoko (and later OpenEZX), demonstrated the devices, and answered questions for people passing by.
Due to the relatively small scope (~40 participants), it was a very productive gathering focused on direct communication between the participants. We had a pretty good time there and everything was well organized. Since the audience was quite heterogenous, the results of the discussions were quite inspiring. I'm looking forward to the next installation of this conference.
OpenMoko
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While we were at MDD, we worked on a lot of OpenMoko issues. We went through the bugtracker, applied some patches, fixed bugs, etc. To improve the OpenMoko appeareance on non-VGA devices, I reworked the panel plugins to scale to different panel sizes. The neod now monitors headphone insertion and removal events and adjusts the mixers accordingly. I also started working on a first-usage wizard to make some of the most important preferences accessible. After switching to mrxvt, we no longer get the automatic opening/closing of the keyboard (since mrxvt is no Gtk+ application). To fix this, I did a new openmoko-terminal application wrapping the VteTerminal widget. This should be useful very soon. Last but not least, we also found time to do some testing on the forthcoming GTA02 device...
OpenEZX
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As promised to the OpenEZX hacker's community, Stefan Schmidt and me took a day off to hack on OpenEZX. It's been a while for both of us and the amount of achieved progress since last year is really cool. Using an OpenMoko root file system, we managed to boot a Motorola A780 via root-over-nfs right into the OpenMoko user interface. OpenMoko simply rocks on the Motorola Ezx Platform, especially the kinetic scrolling is very fluid and intuitive -- even more so than on the Neo1973 GTA01 phone where a slower processor has to take care about 4 times the pixels. Thanks to the new Alsa SoC patch we even heard the A780 playing the OpenMoko startup sound. I added pH5's work on the QVGA adaptions to the OpenMoko theme into SVN and adjusted some missing things in the OpenEmbedded bugtracker. It is our goal to release an OpenEZX preview image before the end of September. The major showstoppers right now are the missing libgsmd integration for the EZX platform. I'll post more pictures or probably rather a video of OpenMoko running on A780 and A1200 soon.
Denmark
To close with something completely unrelated... it was my first time in Denmark and this country has a lot of merits -- did I mention that I fancy cool blondes? :D