OpenMoko world aggregator

Une nouvelle SHR-unstable

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:45:00 -0800

Voilà une nouvelle qui va faire plaisir à beaucoup de monde !

De nouvelles images de la distribution SHR sont sorties !
Pour les plus pressés, c'est par ici.

Il y a eu beaucoup de modifications "sous le capot" (voir cette discussion) dont voici un aperçu (non-exhaustif) :

remplacement du driver graphique (glamo kdrive -> xorg server)
remplacement de la librairie libc (glibc -> eglibc)
thème de Bernd Pruenster par défaut (plus rapide)
le frameworkd en python est recodé progressivement en vala (plus rapide)
phonefsod remplace ophonekitd
intégration de opimd : les contacts et sms peuvent être stockés sur la SIM ou le téléphone (mémoire NAND ou carte micro-SD)
rapprochements avec la branche développement de openembedded.org
possibilité d'upgrade vers le kernel 2.6.31

Attention : comme son nom l'indique, il s'agit vraiment d'une version instable qui comporte de nombreux bugs connus (voir tous les détails ici).

Heureusement, les évolutions vont bon train.
Il est donc conseillé de procéder à des mises à jour (opkg upgrade) après installation.

Par ailleurs, les développeurs d'applications tierces sont invités à vérifier qu'elles ne sont pas "cassées" suite à tous ces changements et à les soumettre auprès de OpenEmbedded.

Un grand merci à toute l'équipe pour le travail accompli et le nouvel élan que cela donnera à cette distribution très appréciée.

Donating my HTC Touch Pro (raph100)

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:45:33 -0800

I bought the HTC Touch Pro some months ago in order to port the freesmartphone.org middleware to it and help to raise an end-user distro. While things began very optimistic (i.e. the modem support was completed after just a few weeks), it came to a relative halt pretty soonish afterwards — because of missing kernel support. Google releasing the kernel source code for the HTC Dream has enabled the HTClinux folks to quickly come up with some very impressive results, but due to the heavy differences in the baseband firmware it did not spare them from carrying out an amazing pile of reverse engineeering — just like every other anti-vendor-port.

While these guys truly have done great work, I personally think it’s not going anywhere soon — at least not to a point where we have an open GNU/Linux on competitive hardware fully supporting all peripherals of the device. Showstoppers are always Bluetooth, Wifi, Sound, Suspend/Resume, and all the other things where Google didn’t care about standard mainline interfaces, but rather decided to put the meat into userland — stowed away behind a “safe” closed source license.

Anyways, this hope/dream/experiment has ended, hence I’m offering to donate my HTC Touch Pro (raph100) to one of the HTClinux kernel hackers as a last act of supporting this anti-vendor-port. If you think you are qualified, drop me a mail. Meanwhile, I’ll continue supporting the Openmoko devices and concentrate on the Palm Pre.

WikiReader ya en España y en castellano

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 01:29:03 -0800

Bueno ya tengo aquí las primeras unidades a la venta del WikiReader de Openmoko y la Wikipedia en español también disponible,
El WikiReader viene con la Wikipedia en ingles incluida en una microSD con mas de 3 millones de entradas, la tarjeta adicional en castellano proporciona medio millón mas
Para obtener la Wikipedia en español hay tres vías

SHR-unstable got a facelift. And you a christmas present....

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:19:15 -0800

[Nov 19 2009, The Internets] It's been psychologically proven that the longer you wait for your presents, the more happy you will be when you finally get them. It seems, the SHR team wants to make you REALLY happy and has let you waiting for quite some time without updates to shr-unstable...

ENOUGH WAITING. Christmas comes a bit early this year, and a new SHR-unstable image is out for public consumption. Keep in mind that this is the first snapshot after quite many major transitions, so don't complain if things are a bit ..well... unstable in the beginning. We are working hard to stabilize things. If you depend on your phone, you will probably not yet want to use this, e.g. right now the ringtones aren't working (it just vibrates).

We had no resources to provide a nice and working upgrade path, so an opkg upgrade is very likely to lead to a non-working system. (Really! It won't work. We know you'll try anyway :). It still won't work). So download the image (lite or full), flash it and start afresh. I am writing this before the new images are out there, so be a bit patient before really grabbing it.

We will take a branch off current shr-unstable in a couple of weeks (after the dust has settled a bit) and start a conservative branch that will allow for more -testing releases and -finally- a stable snapshot. If others want to volunteer to do that, I'll happy hand over that job though.

So what has changed, and what to expect:

First don't expect any miracles. While stuff has changed under the hood, you are still owning a fine piece of open. but outdated hardware. But a path has been laid for future improvements (also performance wise), so this is the way to go. Also, we have tried to keep the look and feel as similar as possible in the new phone apps. You will feel very much at home there. But improvements are much easier now.
xorg server rather than glamo kdrive. We switched to using a proper xorg-server, with a graphics driver that is actively maintained. There have been some improvements, and developer Weiss thinks that there are more perf improvements to get.
eglibc rather than glibc. Just like Debian did, we switched our libc library from glibc to eglibc which (apparently) is a bit better suited to embedded devices.
While the theme contest is still ongoing, we have decided to install the gry theme by Bernd Pruenster by default, it is faster than the default theme, which is not designed for obsolete embedded hardware. The illume theme is still set to "default" or "Illume SHR", so try setting it to *gry* through the top bar wrench (preference settings)
The neo theme is also nice and fast. It is not installed by default, but it is in the feeds. You can easily install in with "opkg install shr-theme-neo". Another theme to try out is the niebiee theme which has been designed with speed in mind ("opkg install shr-theme-niebiee").
the python-based frameworkd is being replaced bit by bit with components written in Vala. The first components that we use are fsousaged (which replaces ousaged), fsodeviced, and fsonetworkd. Mickey posted a status update on the new fso stuff.
phonefsod replaces the ophonekitd phone daemon and and phoneuid/libphoneui are now responsible for all things GUI with the phone apps.
opimd is included and we have the possibility to save incoming and outgoing SMS as well as contacts on the SIM card or on the SD card (using the sqlite backend). New SMS/contacts are now by default saved in a database on the FreeRunner (SD card or NAND), so be careful before reflashing! (Someone should probabably give instructions somewhere on how to change the configuration to use the SIM card as default and how to transfer data from one backend to another.)
We have proceeded with the integration work with openembedded.org and we are very close to their development branch now, patches will be submitted to really merge SHR with upstream. This also means that we now have updated versions of basically every software component in this image. This migration has unfortunately caused quite some head aches and build problems...
mokonnect was finally able to connect to my WEP WLAN without crashing the kernel :).
We will be providing a possibilitiy to upgrade the kernel to 2.6.31 (including KMS goodness, see how-dri-and-drm-work) for adventurous users some time after this release. We just had to make a cut somewhere and this did not make it in yet.

What is NOT working:

Ringtones are not working yet after the first call (it just vibrates). There is an issue related to the new fsodeviced and how it handles alsa sound profiles. We are investigating this issue. UPDATE: FIXED NOW SEE BELOW
2s Power button press does not shutdown, as the delayed action thingie seems broken. You'll just get the "shutdown" menu in any case ATM...
"Hoversels" in python-elementary seem broken, so you can't switch profiles from the shr-settings app.
The time is off as the timezone remains set to "Europe/London". UPDATE: FIXED NOW SEE BELOW
Number-to-Name resolution is currently broken in the SMS message list. UPDATE: FIXED NOW
ffalarms crashes when you add an alarm... So don't use your FR as an alarm clock with this image.

External packages, such as those from opkg.org might be broken due to the updated components. We do invite external app programmers to submit their applications for inclusion as a openembedded build recipe and have them added to the SHR feed, so that apps are just a simple "opkg install" away.

Finally, although this snapshot has taken quite some time, I think we should congratulate those people that have worked hard in their spare time to put it all back together, first and foremost mrmoku, who has been a great informal lead dev and tireless buildhost guardian. But also TAsn, dos1, JaMa, Heinervdm, JesusMcCloud, mickeyl, pb (and many others that I have forgotten now), as well as all those 3rd party application authors of apps that make the openmoko interesting.

UPDATE: Some of the issues are resolved already with a simple opkg upgrade (e.g. ringtones should work now). An upgrade of fsodeviced might require a reboot though.... But some upgrades from the initial image will require manual intervention. This is what I found so far:

opkg remove -force-depends apm apmd
opkg install task-fso2-compliance
This will install the correct power management stuff and makes things feel speedier here. Try it and check if the animation of shr-today is nicer again.
opkg remove -force-depends atd
opkg install atd-over-fso
This will probably make your ffalarms work again.
opkg install tzdata tzdata-europe (or whatever package you want)
Personally, I would also "opkg remove -force-depends avahi-daemon avahi-autoipd" to get rid of avahi.

Those fixes will automatically go into new images as we fix them...

Actus

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:57:00 -0800

Voici quelques nouvelles neuves (ou pas) glanées sur la toile :

[ Matériel ouvert ] Le projet Open Graphics a lancé la fabrication de sa carte de développement basée sur un FPGA (OGD1)
[ Interface ] Qualee est sorti en version 0.0.4
[ IRC ] Deux nouveaux canaux IRC ont été crées sur freenode : #tangogps et #smile-slideshow
[ Communauté ] La page "Community update" a été publiée le 11 Novembre dernier
[ Mobilité ] Les SmartBook (netbook + smartphone) seraient les terminaux de demain
[ Mobilité ] Droid, le smartphone de Motorola basé sur Android 2.0 (Eclair) sort aux US
[ OS ] Chrome OS lancé cette semaine ?
[ OS ] Samsung lance son propre système nommé Bada ("océan" en Coréen). Est-il sous licence Libre ?

Bonne lecture.

[Qalee] Some news and … new version !!

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:33:24 -0800

Hi all !

I’ve released a new version of Qalee this week, 0.0.4

This version bring interesting features but they are a little buggy ..

- Widgets managers : as you know Qalee has the ability to load menu entries dynamically and their is also widgets on the background. I’ve developed a plugin/widget server and a menu entry to manage install/delete/configure those plugins …

- Network management plugin, it can now configure the gprs ( thanks to burn2 ) and wifi networks ( witch works at least with opened one, wpa is buggy and wep not tested ) ( to show the configure dialog, press the aux button when you are on the plugin ( need help for user guide on the wifi … ) )

- Network widget : will connected to network, press the network icon to show some basic informations ( ip, … )

- New keyboard : I’ve developed a keyboard with 6 keys. For now, it’s long to launch ( 10 seconds ), I’ll work on it. But it’s really finger friendly. Under the hoods this keyboard contains two parts, a daemon witch send keyevents to the active window and the keyboard itself, they communicate by dbus ( utility ? later )

- Their is also some changes in the core and some widgets added to the libqalee ( You will see the GenericPage widgets in action with the widget manager and the wifi connection manager )

I’ve released this version for testing purpose and to get feedback .. it’s already in development stage, not stable. A new version should come quickly, with fixes to the known bugs, you can use the bug tracker to fill bug reports.

I’m now working on an other project, Qamino and poi proximity alerter witch will be able to show wikipedia page. It will warn you when you are next to a poi and show his decription or wikipedia page if available. ( Use case : citytrip, radar proximity alert, … )

Then I will work on a dbus network daemon, you will be able to send dbus message over network … Yes, with the keyboard daemon, you will have the ability to launch a keyboard on you pc to write on the freerunner or to make some keyboard shortcuts on the freerunner to manage you pc. It will be also possible to be warned on the pc when the battery is low, when you get a sms, …

Hope you like it,

Christophe

PS : Sorry for dns problems ( due to isp ) and for being long to make this release

http://www.qalee.org

Towards the end of 2009

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:15:00 -0800

I just came back from the annual OpenEmbedded Developer Meeting (OEDEM) which happened to be in Cambridge, UK. It was a very productive meeting and we agreed on some important things to move OpenEmbedded forward as a whole. Please see the mailing lists for meeting minutes and summaries. We also elected a new board for the e.V. and despite the grief that led to me leaving the OE core team (which subsequently lead to the dissolving of it), I have volunteered (and been reelected) to serve a 2nd year as board member.

As written in a previous installment of this column, I have dedicated the lion’s share of 2009 to the reimplementation of the freesmartphone.org APIs in Vala. Please see the wiki for architectural details, as I don’t want to repeat this here. This is an overview of the current status:

fsousaged

fsousaged has been fully completed and is being used for quite a while now in distributions. All of the plugins are working:

dbus_service: Implementation of resource handling as per org.freesmartphone.Usage.
lowlevel_kernel26: Low level suspend/resume handling for Linux 2.6.
lowlevel_openmoko: Low level suspend/resume handling for Openmoko Smartphones GTA01/GTA02.

fsodeviced

fsodeviced has been fully completed, but is not yet being used in any distributions. All of the plugins are working:

accelerometer: generic accelerometer handling, needs one of the device-specific accelerometer plugins.
accelerometer_lis302: lis 302 accelerometer support.
alsa_audio: alsa audio PCM output and routing (scenario) support.
kernel_idle: system idle notifications.
kernel_input: system input handling.
kernel_info: kernel information.
kernel26_display: display class-device based brightness control.
kernel26_rtc: realtime clock, wakeup alarm.
kernel26_leds: LED class-device based brightness control.
kernel26_powersupply: peripheral power supply control.
openmoko_powercontrol: device-specific power supply controls for Openmoko devices.
thinkpad_powercontrol: device-specific power supply controls for IBM Thinkpad devices.

fsotimed

fsotimed is about half-way complete compared to frameworkd. The working plugin is:

alarm: DBus alarm service as per org.freesmartphone.Time.Alarm.

fsonetworkd

fsonetwork is done with the same level of functionality as in frameworkd. The working plugin is:

sharing: internet connection sharing.

fsogsmd

fsogsmd has been on hold since end of April due to waiting for more Vala language features. When they finally appeared in September, I picked up where I left and furiosly worked on what i perceive as the prime subsystem of FSO

The basic infrastructure is more or less complete now and we cover about 50% of the DBus API as per org.freesmartphone.GSM.*, i.e. device info, sim access, network registration, sms, and call handling is working. All work has been done in a generic way, i.e. without taking any care of modem specifics yet — which is what will be my next task before I go on covering the missing API.

fsogpsd

I have added a skeleton of that to the repository and adapted some lower-level classes in libfsotransport to work both for fsogsmd and fsogpsd. I would have done more work, but I’m not keen on implementing the Gypsy API, since I think it’s not a particular good DBus API

fsopreferencesd / fsopimd / fsoeventsd

All these have not been started, not even been thinking much about ‘em. fsopreferencesd will probably have to wait until dconf / gvariant / gsettings have finally landed in glib. fsopimd is waiting for a redesign of the opimd API. fsoeventsd needs a new architecture, but I have to discuss this with the others before we can start cranking.

2010

will be a very interesting year for Linux on mobile devices, even more so for freesmartphone.org. Due to the lack of someone funding FSO, I will probably not find much time to work on FSO in 2010 — that’s why I’m so furiously working on getting most of it to a state where others can jump in before the end of this year.

Apart from that, I hope we can get FSOSHRCON’10 happening very early in 2010 and uplevel kernel support for some of the more interesting semi-open devices such as the Palm Pre, Nokia N900, and the HTC family. FSO would be more than happy to add device-specific support for this hardware once the kernel is up to par.

Cheers!

Minha instalação do Android no Openmoko. 2/x

noreply@blogger.com (Levy) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 10:00:58 -0800

Backup

Depois do backup do FDOM, uma distribuição mais completa, baseada na OM, e cheia de recursos para Hardware, como para o Acelerometro, GPS e Wifi.

Imagens novas do Android (New Images)

Eu baixei as imagens no site do desenvolvedor Sean Mcneil, que de alguma forma misteriosa tinha começado o port do kernel do Android para o Openmoko antes de o código se tornar de fato aberto.

Percebi que a página do wiki sobre as Distribuições instaláveis no Openmoko mudou, incluindo o Gentoo e o Android, sendo que agora temos 8 distribuições que podemos usar (logo chegarão mais).

Apliquei os arquivos de, kernel uImage, e de imagem jffs2, usando a ferramenta dfu-util como sempre fiz para instalar a OM na Flash interna, apesar de precisar da microSD formatada de uma forma específica para iniciar, o Android fica na Flash.

No primeira tentativa de iniciar o Android a tela ficou preta e o LED de fundo LCD ligado um tempo consideravelmente longo, em torno de 10 minutos, foi quando percebi que ele não iria terminar de iniciar :( e me lembrei do alerta sobre o Android nesta versão não carregar a bateria enquanto não aparece o ambiente Dalvik, e com isso tornar impossível ligar o celular com essa bateria totalmente descarregada.

Plando de volta (Failback plan)

Desliguei o celular, tirando a bateria, e baixei as ultimas imagens do OM2008 para instalar na Flash e reparticionar o microSD.

Referencias:

Android: http://people.openmoko.org/sean_mcneil/

Imagens diárias da distribuição oficial OM: http://downloads.openmoko.org/daily/

Adicionados:

http://code.google.com/p/android-on-freerunner/
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Android

__

activité d'Octobre 2009

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:34:00 -0800

Halloween et la Toussaint sont passés, c'est maintenant le moment du billet mensuel - presque à l'heure !

C'est parti pour un résumé du mois d'Octobre.

Actualités

Distributions :

Hackable:1 rev5rc1 est sortie - avis aux fan de Chuck Norris
QtMoko v14 est maintenant hébergée sur sourceforge
Des paquets de SHR ont intégré le dépôt Debian

Informations diverses :

Le Wikireader d'Openmoko est en 3ème place chez amazon
préparez-vous pour le FOSDEM 2010
Le freerunner serait compatible avec le système EGNOS qui améliore la précision du GPS
Christoph Mair a réussi à intégrer un capteur de pression (et température) dans le freerunner
Businessmobile a publié un article sur les téléphones opensource
Android est-il vraiment "Linux" ? La réponse de Harald Welte après la conférence Android Mythbusters

Consultez les dernières pages Community Updates (14 octobre et 28 octobre) pour plus d'infos.

Voici les informations dont ce blog s'est fait l'écho durant le mois d'Octobre.

La société Openmoko a sorti un nouveau produit : le Wikireader.

Plusieurs événements autour de l'embarqué se sont déroulés à Grenoble :

la conférence de Thomas Petazzoni (suivie d'une rencontre fortuite avec Harald Welte)
l'Embedded System Week (un événement international majeur)

A Lyon, les JDLL ont été également l'occasion de rencontres intéressantes.

Après avoir choisi un logo, l'équipe SHR propose une compétition de thème.

Enfin le projet AMEE cherche des contributeurs.

Encore une nouvelle étape : la barre des 1000 discussions a été franchie courant octobre.

Souhaitons la bienvenue à : Helios, Gnuyo, Henry-Nicolas et Pathe.

Le top 10 des mokos du mois :

Garth : 15 posts
Burn2 : 12 posts
menestrel : 12 post
okhin : 12 posts
misc : 8 posts
Henry-Nicolas : 6 posts
swap38 : 5 posts
asthro : 4 posts
Gnuyo : 4 posts
fylefou : 3 posts

Voici une sélection non-exhaustive des nombreuses discussions du mois.

Communauté :

Logiciels :

Matériels :

Projets :

Divers :

Je vous invite également à parcourir les messages sans réponses.

Deux nouvelles pages ce mois-ci :

Qtmoko : une page très complète sur cette distribution qui a le vent en poupe (merci à freedomsound et burn2)
Partenariat avec les associations : une page sur les relations possibles avec différentes associations (merci misc)

Les pages suivantes ont également subies d'importantes mises à jour :

Statistiques du site

Graphique des visites :
(le nombre de hits a doublé)

Nombre de visites par mois :
(46709 hits pour 1965 visites/jour en moyenne)

(Cliquez sur l'image pour l'agrandir)

Visites par jour :
(2 pics impressionnants les 13 et 14 octobre)

Statistiques du forum :
("seulement" 862 messages ce mois-ci contre plus de 1200 en août et en septembre)

Les statistiques du wiki :

Bilan

Qu'est-ce qui peut expliquer cet étonnant pic des 13 et 14 octobre : le choix du logo de SHR ? les événements autour des systèmes embarqués ? la sortie du wikireader ?

Je n'en sais rien mais je pencherais pour la dernière solution.
En effet, openmoko-fr.org apparaît dans les 6 premiers résultats lorsqu'on cherche "openmoko" ou "wikireader" sur google.fr.

Pourtant ce Wikireader vise un public radicalement différend de celui visé par le Neo Freerunner.
Je pense que nous n'aurons pas souvent l'occasion d'en parler sur ce site (à moins qu'une surprise au niveau du code ou du matériel permette d'étendre ses possibilités).
Cependant, avec sa conception simple et efficace, sa facilité d'utilisation et son prix, ce produit semble rencontrer un certain succès d'après le buzz généré et les ventes sur Amazon.

S'il devient la réussite commerciale espérée par Sean Moss-Pultz, le Wikireader aura rempli sa mission : remettre la société Openmoko en situation d'envisager l'avenir sereinement ... et pouvoir reprendre le développement de smartphones opensources.
Et ça, on serait serait pas contre !

Los menus "ocultos" del WikiReader.

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:15:12 -0800

Gracias a Thomas HOCEDEZ y su blog he descubierto algunos de los menus "secretos", si algo puede secreto teniendo acceso al codigo fuente :P , para acceder a estos menus/programas se hace apretando una de las teclas mientras le das al boton de power para encenderlo

Boton History+Power=Calculadora

Wile E Reality catches up to FreeRunner

Linux Hater — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 04:57:00 -0700

Sweetness. Looks like the FreeRunner is finally dead.

I’d just like to take a moment, and lament about all the top notch features we could have had with a truly open source phone like the FreeRunner.

grep’ing through your address book using extended regular expressions
finger’ing your Fav Five
Having 10 different competing UI’s packaged by dozens of different distributions
Being able to ssh to your phone so that you can check it’s uptime
Using PGP to sign your SMS messages. Beware though, after the signature, you’ll only have 5 characters left to work with.
Sending people videos in ogg theora format
Losing data randomly with ext4
Unloading the kernel module for the asterisk button because I never use it
Changing your keypad to dvorak layout, where the most commonly used numbers are in the middle row
Using gkrellm to monitor your battery power, as it is slowly sucked away by gkrellm
More efficiently using your tiny screen with a tiling window manager
Running only free and open javascript
Warning users that their keypad lock password is not strong enough
E17, some day. No, really, someday.

Just let it die, please

Linux Hater — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 07:16:00 -0800

Don’t panic everyone! Apparently openSUSE is not dead yet.

Seriously though. I wish all SUSE’s would just die. SUSE was born a crack baby, and has grown up to be a crack smoking crack dealer. Even their stupid lizard looks like it’s cracked out. I bet the lizard is really just a vessel used for crack smuggling. Running their distro is more painful than trying to make a call on an OpenMoko. If I was convicted of murder, and the punishment was solitary confinement plus the use of a computer running SuSE, I’d just hang myself. And even worse, If I had to make the choice, I’d run Gentoo before I ran SuSE.

But don’t take it from just from me. Their own developers have a nice list of why you should not use SUSE. That’s some really great marketing work guys.

I don’t think Novell never really gave a shit about openSUSE. They just saw what Redhat did with Fedora, and openSUSE is just a poor “me too” attempt. You know, Linux is about community or something. So let’s just toss our POS distro over the wall, and see if some freetards pick it up. Because, like, that would be totally awesome. The community has infinite free resources, why don’t we harness some? It’s really easy. You just make a wiki page with really tiny fonts, stick an “open” in your name, and call it a day.

Now that money is tight, their true colors show. I don’t give a shit about what any open letter says. It’s the results that matter. And the results say that you guys are getting your breakfast, lunch, and dinner eaten by RHEL, Feodra, CentOS, Ubuntu, and Debian. Why don’t you guys just go spend your time porting your boring management software to distros that actually matter? or work on something that people want, like C#.

But whatever, if you want to port your crack-addled configuration system to yet another UI toolkit, be my guest. Now that Qt is LGPL, you can even port things back! Yay! For those of you that haven’t seen it, here’s the wonderful UI for picking package updates.

And to help you understand that, I’ve added in green, the path that your eye is supposed to take to make sense of things.

So far the only thing I’ve heard that openSUSE is good for is to do development for SLES, and only if you happen to be a poor Novell employee. Because folks tell me that you can’t actually do SLES development using SLES. Yay!

Oh, and we can also thank Novell and SuSE for giving money to jackasses like GregKH. Why is it that the FOSS world attracts so many jackasses? Something about, how I wrote this free software for free and for freedom, so if you do anything with it, I at least get to be a totally pain in your ass. Thanks Novell, for supporting people like GregKH. Why don’t you fund him for another month so he can write a whole new deck about why Ubuntu sucks. Because that makes openSUSE just seem that much better. And it’s like, totally awesome for Linux.

2008 in Review

noreply@blogger.com (Phil) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:45:00 -0800

I know, it's a month and a half into 2009, but... well, better late than never.

The following is a list of the most popular posts on this blog and on my web site in 2008. Numbers 1, 3, and 5 hit Reddit. People mostly found the other articles by searching.

Top Ten Essential Emacs Tips.
Scrolling with the Thinkpad's TrackPoint in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid. Who knew a little X.org tweak could cause so much trouble?
A million lines of Lisp. Apparently, people will read anything about Lisp.
Emacs in Ubuntu Hardy now has anti-aliased fonts. And it is beautiful.
Stupid screen tricks. GNU Screen has changed the way I work and the way I interact with computers.
Instructions for setting up Emacs on a variety of platforms.
Towards using the FreeRunner as my primary phone. Which, I am happy to say, I have been now for months.
Writing a raytracer from scratch. Why, you ask? Why the hell not? It was a lot of fun and I learned a thing or two about software and math.

(Google Analytics helped me make this list. Interesting tidbit: among the browsers that people typically use to read this blog, Firefox has a commanding lead with 75%. The runner-up is Safari with 7%, followed by IE with 5%.)

Highlights of the past year:

I wrote a thesis and got some papers published. In the course of my work, I also learned a few things about software development and tools, which I'll share shortly.
I traveled to New York, Las Vegas, Germany, and Switzerland (with passage through Spain, Liechtenstein, Austria, and the UK). All of these were a lot of fun.
I got a new phone (some would say, a mobile computer with a phone in it), one capable of running only free software. It's glorious.

2008 was a great year. Except for the collapse of the global economy, but remember, now is the time to buy. Here's to 2009!