New job

As some of you might already be aware, in November I joined Intel's Open Source Technology Centre (OTC) to work on the Yocto Project, a Linux Foundation project that aims to bring together embedded Linux developers from across the industry. More specifically I am working on Poky, Yocto's build system, which was originally based on OpenEmbedded and has always maintained a high level of compatibility. I've worked with OE for a number of years and working on Poky is really not much different, although I've had the opportunity to dig a little deeper into BitBake and Poky/OE's internals, gaining a greater understanding of how the system works (and of course being able to contribute a number of fixes.) Lately I have also had a chance to test out Poky-built systems on some real hardware, including an eMenlow box and a RouterStation Pro board (usually my runtime testing and debugging is done within QEMU.)

The recent agreement on collaboration between the Yocto Project and OE has been a great thing to witness. At the moment Yocto is closing in on its 1.0 release which is shaping up to be a good one; meanwhile over the last month work has begun in earnest on openembedded-core, the common base for both projects going forward. I've submitted a few patches to oe-core already and when 1.0 is out the door I am keen to get stuck in on further improvements there.

I must say, it's exciting to not only be working with open source / free software technologies on a daily basis, but as a former proprietary software developer for many years, it is also a great privilege to be working on open source projects full time, and to be working alongside some very smart people both within Intel and in the wider community.

Of course, all this open source stuff at work is not going to prevent me from hacking on other things at home; in fact it has given me renewed energy to work on my existing projects and even a new thing or two. More on that later.

Opie 1.2.4 is out

Whew. After over a year of hacking, Opie 1.2.4 is finally out. Thanks to everyone who helped! I hope we can get 1.2.5 out in less time, something like six months perhaps? Maybe if I get a few more patches / other assistance... (hint, hint)

In the mean time my next task is to get 1.2.4 recipes into OpenEmbedded. I will also be trying to get the OpenSync plugin into a more usable state after some fairly significant changes in the core recently. Here's hoping we can have a stable release of that soon as well.

Waking the dead

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 :)