Maemo/Mer on Freerunner

These informations are not updated, please see Mer/Maemo on Freerunner half ported.

Hi all,

One month ago i spoke about the ability to put and Ubuntu into the Freerunner mobile phone. Well after a little bit of research, it pointed out that Ubuntu is compiled for armv5 while Freerunner is armv4, so Ubuntu is not compatible with the Freerunner.

Debian instead, the rock in which ubuntu is built in, is compiled for armv4 in the armel version. So a full debian operating system in the Freerunner is possible as the debian Freerunner port demostrates. But debian Freerunner port is not famous for his UI, which is ugly and unusable.

After a deep research i came into the Maemo project and expecially in it’s 100% Free implementation called Mer. I started contacting the developers and i found a very active team. I’m now working with them to provide a Freerunner that runs Mer to sell at eshopen. In the last days we (well, primary
Carsten Munk) reached in building all the gtk and hildon framework for debian armel. So we should be albe to have Mer into a Freerunner in one month more.

Let’s see what will happen. :)

Ubuntu on Freerunner a new era

Hi folks :)

Maybe you still don’t know, but ubuntu will support ARMel from Jaunty. Well and what is the most hacked device of the year? the Openmoko Freerunner!

Well. but what is the relationship between ubuntu and ARM? It’s that the Freerunner uses an ARM9 @ 400 MHz processor… So, with a little bit of work, Ubuntu will be available for Freerunner too! :)

I’m starting documenting about how to build a rootfs and how to make it jffs2, and it seems easy. What is my project?

Imagine a phone, with all the fso framework to act as a phone and with a full ubuntu backend. Could you imagine the power? :)

I think i can accomplish this thank to my accepted mentoring by a MOTU and my position as an ingeneer at eshopen, the italian Openmoko Freerunner seller.

In late March we should be able to release the first image… stay tuned!

I don’t like git too

Today on Planet Ubuntu i found a nice post about git. Well. It’s the revision control system developed by Linus Torvalds itself after the BitKeeper debacle. As this post says, git sucks in a lot of ways. i completely agree with Scott when he says so and he shows how git is cryptic and hard to use.

Instead of using git, i use mercurial which does exactly what i want as i want and it’s really well documented. And it’s distribuited of course

D programmin language programs available for ubuntu: dsss and libtango

Hi,

On december 08 i worked to make a better support in ubuntu linux of the D programming language which is the successor of the C programming language IMHO.

If it’s so powerful as i say why isn’t it used like the C language?

  1. it’s quite new, and there is just one book about this language and it’s name is Learn to Tango with D which i bought in pdf version for less than 11€
  2. There is no a standard library: there are two libraries phobos and tango. phobos is supported by Walter Bright which is the D programming language creator and it’s seems to be not too much powerful and it’s very lite. Tango is community supported, it has a book about it, it seems very powerful and does not need to much space, it’s written in D and it’s used by a lot of programs.
  3. Lack of free (read as full GPL) compiler
  4. No integration in Gnu linux distributions

Well, these are for me the big pitfails of the D language. While the 1 issue is solved by time the issues 2 and 3 are the most important ones that should be solved soon as possible to spread the D usage.

For issue 3 and 4 i thought i could do something. And i started working. We did a group in launchpad.net and we started working. Right now we packaged dsss and libtango for ubuntu. In ubuntu and debian there is the gdc compiler which seems to be no longer updated and there are some bugs still opened. The libtango and dsss packages we created are designed to work with gdc packages in ubuntu and debian. To start programming in D on ubuntu or debian you have just do edit your /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following lines:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/d-language-packagers/ubuntu jaunty main

Then install the dsss and libtango package with:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install dsss libtango

Then you can start making your own D program and save it (eg program.d). To compile just do:

gdc -fversion=Posix -I /usr/include/d -L/usr/lib/tango/ program.d -lgtango

And your program will be compiled, just execute the result a.out to see your program running.

For issue 3 i’m still working on it :)