No, not the UK TV series - although I have to say I have enjoyed watching it since I've been here. No, what I'm referring to is resurrecting third party Zaurus/QPE/Opie applications. Now that Opie is in Angstrom the next task is to fix up third party applications and get them into the feeds. You can monitor this effort here (fortunately I'm not the only one working on it).
A lot of this is driven by user demand - several users have asked for specific applications to be available. One of the requested applications was qpenmapfe (a frontend for the nmap security testing tool) which is now unmaintained, and does not work very well on high resolution devices either. However, I found an alternative called qpe-nmap which although it was also unmaintained, it just needed a few tweaks to become fully usable on a wide range of devices. I contacted the author, Fabian Bieker, and he was very helpful, even agreeing to allow me to continue maintaining it (I don't envisage much maintenance will be required, but I'm prepared to do what is needed). The (mini-) project has a new website and a build recipe has just been committed to OpenEmbedded on its way into Angstrom.
Moving forward, I would be happy to take on maintainership of some more older third party applications that are compatible with Opie. If you are the owner of some generally useful Zaurus/QPE application project and you'd like to see your application maintained again, please get in touch with me and we'll see what we can work out :)
Showing posts with label angstrom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label angstrom. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
SparkLAN Wifi card and Linux
People often ask about which Wifi card to buy to use with Linux, and in the past this was a difficult question to answer. When you're talking about a card to use on a PDA the available selection is even smaller.
However, on a whim I recently purchased a SparkLAN WCFM-100 which is an 802.11b/g CompactFlash card to try it out. Linux compatibility was listed in its product documentation, which is a good start.
It didn't quite work out of the box, however all I needed to do was enable building the libertas and libertas_cs modules in the kernel defconfig in OE, rebuild it, copy the modules over to my Zaurus, extract the firmware (instructions here) and copy that over to the Z, load the modules, and it worked. So I would definitely recommend this product to anyone wanting a wifi card for their Linux-based PDA. When I get some time I will try do document the procedure properly and/or submit some patches to make it easier to get working in Angstrom.
However, on a whim I recently purchased a SparkLAN WCFM-100 which is an 802.11b/g CompactFlash card to try it out. Linux compatibility was listed in its product documentation, which is a good start.
It didn't quite work out of the box, however all I needed to do was enable building the libertas and libertas_cs modules in the kernel defconfig in OE, rebuild it, copy the modules over to my Zaurus, extract the firmware (instructions here) and copy that over to the Z, load the modules, and it worked. So I would definitely recommend this product to anyone wanting a wifi card for their Linux-based PDA. When I get some time I will try do document the procedure properly and/or submit some patches to make it easier to get working in Angstrom.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Angstrom Opie 1.2.3 testing
Testing images of the Ångström distribution containing Opie 1.2.3 are now available for many devices, see this page for details. If your device is listed, we would welcome your testing and feedback.
This has been a long time coming, and I'd like to thank everyone who helped make it possible. Of course this is just a step towards Opie becoming supported in Angstrom - we'll allow at least a month for people to test and then we'll evaluate the situation, and possibly after further tweaking be able to release final images, populate feeds and finally declare Opie as supported.
Meanwhile, over the holidays I have been making quite a few fixes in Opie CVS to be included in 1.2.4 - many of them fix bugs that have annoyed me and no doubt others for a while now, which is very satisfying. Included were changes to make VMemo actually usable, many small improvements in AdvancedFM, better alarm sound playback in the Clock, and some others. Once Opie 1.2.3 becomes supported in at least one distribution we can start to think about doing the 1.2.4 release.
This has been a long time coming, and I'd like to thank everyone who helped make it possible. Of course this is just a step towards Opie becoming supported in Angstrom - we'll allow at least a month for people to test and then we'll evaluate the situation, and possibly after further tweaking be able to release final images, populate feeds and finally declare Opie as supported.
Meanwhile, over the holidays I have been making quite a few fixes in Opie CVS to be included in 1.2.4 - many of them fix bugs that have annoyed me and no doubt others for a while now, which is very satisfying. Included were changes to make VMemo actually usable, many small improvements in AdvancedFM, better alarm sound playback in the Clock, and some others. Once Opie 1.2.3 becomes supported in at least one distribution we can start to think about doing the 1.2.4 release.
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