mickeyl April 21st, 2005

OpenEmbedded / OpenZaurus / Opie

Introduction

Welcome to the 3rd OOO newsletter - keeping you up to date, straight from the horse’s mouth! :)

OpenEmbedded

OpenEmbedded is our next generation build system - a set of tools and metadata to build Linux distributions for embedded devices.

There has been very much progress on OpenEmbedded - both in the packages metadata and all over the core system and utilities. We now have metadata for over 600 packages in the new system - minus a few duplicates. Among the new packages are X server related ones, glib, gtk+, and a number of gpe related ones. We are proud to announce that a lot of work has been done by Mr. Philip Blundell who joined the OpenEmbedded team to evaluate if OE is capable to be the build system for future familiar linux releases. Although nothing has been set in stone yet, things are looking really good.

The OpenEmbedded website - which was formerly hosted at sourceforge.net - is now hosted at handhelds.org. The new mailing list is oe@handhelds.org. Subscribe to this mailing list and join us in the discussion over the OpenEmbedded build system. Device-specific topics should still be addressed to the relevant lists at sourceforge.net and handhelds.org.

In its short past, the OpenEmbedded build system has received much more contributions from volunteers than the OpenZaurus buildroot project in its whole lifecycle. So, all in all, the future looks very bright for this project.

OpenEmbedded/Zaurus

OpenEmbedded/Zaurus (also known as OpenZaurus) is our alternative Linux distribution for the Sharp Zaurus family of PDA devices. It has been ported to other architectures, e.g. the HP iPAQ, the SIEMENS SIMpad, and the M&N Ramses, to name a few.

Thanks to the enormous momentum of the OpenEmbedded project, we can now build flashable images for the Zaurus again. This means we will (hopefully) soon be able to release OpenZaurus 3.5.1 and resume the work on Zaurus-specific issues.

A very interesting patch by John Lenz - who recently started porting the Zaurus specifics to the linux kernel 2.6 - was the trigger for the OpenZaurus kernel work relaunch. We have added a repository for the new OpenZaurus kernel @ openzaurus.bkbits.net. Kernel discussion is on-topic on openzaurus-devel@lists.sf.net. We definitly need more helping hands here.

OpenEmbedded/iPAQ

OpenIpaq, which basically was just a fun-project by Greg ‘Treke’ Gilbert and me, won’t be developed any further. It will be merged into future familiar linux releases.

OpenEmbedded/SIMpad

A new bootloader (based on the handhelds.org bootldr) for OpenSIMpad is approaching - although there are some issues with the MQ200 graphics subsystem left which have to be sorted out before a release can happen. I ported the SIMpad specifics both into the handhelds.org 2.4 kernel and into 2.4.25-vrs2-pxa1. There won’t be more work for kernel 2.4 for the SIMpad. Bernhard Rosenkraenzer ported Zecke’s SIMpad kernel 2.6 work to 2.6.5 and this is pending volunteers to test and further develop.

In general, the community support for the SIMpad is very low and disappointing. If there won’t be a drastic increase of volunteers, I don’t see a future for OpenSIMpad.

Opie

Opie is a graphical environment for PDAs, WebPads and other (embedded) devices. It contains applications such as PIM, Networking, Graphics, Settings, etc. Specific device supported has been integrated for all available Zaurus models, most IPAQs, the SIMpad, and the YopY.

The previous weeks have been very active since we started doing some important cleanups in the Opie development tree. Already completed is the migration from libopie1 to the set of smaller and functionally separated libopie2* libraries. We also started to migrate applications using the qt debugging framework (qDebug and friends) to the much more flexible and type-safe Opie debugging framework. A file notification wrapper based on the linux native kernel interface dnotify has been developed by me. We will use this class to substitute some of the CPU cycle wasting ‘polling’ algorithms with efficient notifications.

Wim Delvaux started with networksettings2 and alwin and zecke did very impressive work on the new Opie imageviewer ‘opie-eye’. Dan Williams continued his work on the new opie-packagemanager and contributed his new application ‘opie-dagger’. ljp added the ‘opie-gutenbrowser’.

Despite all these improvements, the list of currently unmaintained Opie applications is still pretty large. If you want to adopt an application or help to improve Opie in other aspects, then please send us patches or get in touch with us via opie-devel@handhelds.org.

Epilogue

I hope you enjoyed reading the 3rd edition of the OpenEmbedded/OpenZaurus/Opie newsletter. Feel free to provide feedback or send in questions. Questions of general interest will be answered in the next newsletter.

Thanks, Michael ‘Mickey’ Lauer.

• misc