Wednesday, September 24, 2008

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 :)

3 comments:

Marcin Juszkiewicz said...

If some users will ask you for Mileage then contact me - I have big ugly patch for it to make it work better on hires screens. It would require some more work to be done but it is a good start.

Unknown said...

Opie reader and the opie vnc server would be very useful to port.

previouslysilentOld said...

it's a real shame that Mickey Lauer lost the sources to wellenreiter! I don't know if QT kismet still exists.

thanks for all your hard work. I'm currently playing with zubuntu but keep a close eye on angstrom opie and gpe One day I hope that the myriad linux distros will start to merge again!