A free Gnome-based Linux distribution for mobile devices such as smartphones and PDAs has achieved a major release. OpenedHand's Poky Linux 3.0 ("Blinky") is based on X11, GTK+, and the Matchbox window manager, much like the Nokia-sponsored Maemo.org project. However, in place of the proprietary Hildon GUI layer, it includes a new "Sato 0.1" plain GTK+ component.
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The software on the phone has little to do with making outgoing calls/receiving incoming calls with any company.
Unless you are living in some weird country where the companies are completely incompatible - meaning one cannot call customers from another company.
In DK it doesn't matter. The only important information is on the SIM card. The phone functionality has little to do with that.
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When you go to register for a different company's network, you have to go and physically hand over your phone to get your phone set up for their network. At that time, they'll update the firmware -- and if the firmware is unfamiliar, they'll either reinstall it or replace the phone (both possibly at your cost, depending on the carrier).
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Has anyone heard whether Pokey is supported (either officially or otherwise) on Palm Pilots? If so, this could be the ticket to finally breaking away from the dinosaur-old PalmOS on my Palm T|X -- very exciting!
In any case, mobile devices are a great idea, and I'm thrilled that the open source community is taking the initiative here. With Google's (and others) online office apps, increasingly more widespread wireless/connectivity options, and improved network/online storage, the idea of mobile devices as dumb terminal "portals" to everywhere-accessable tools is almost a reality.
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Let's have a look to :
http://hackndev.com
maybe they'll enlighten your day.
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OK, I've lost count, does that make five or seven "phone" freeware linux distros?
There is definitely no official support on any Palm device.
Since the Palms are almost all pxa devices and there's a pxa port of linux it's 'merely' a matter of device driver writing to get an unofficial port.
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Poky doesn't use any Gnome stuff. It's X11/GTK+/Matchbox.
And Hildon IS proprietary (at least it was until I last checked).
Correction: It uses GStreamer Embedded, but to say that it is Gnome-based is a bit to far, especially since it uses Matchbox (and Matchbox is a DE like Gnome, but not Gnome)
Edited 2007-08-03 06:35
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GNOME is a desktop environment (DE), matchbox is a window manager; so matchbox is like metacity, or compiz, or kwin. matchbox itself is made of various components: a window manager, the virtual keyboard, the panel you see on the top in the screenshots, the main "desktop".
sato is the overall look, provided by a gtk+ theme engine, a gtk+ theme and a matchbox theme.
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Qtopia is more mature, has better development tools and has tons of applications ported and many more are easy to port thanks to Qt.
That, in my opinion, makes it one of the best embedded development platforms around. These guys are just reinventing the wheel for the sake of it, but hey, it's all good as far I know and care.
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Obviously it isn't rebuilding the wheel. The wheel has already been built (Gtk+, GNOME, Nokia Hildon, PalmOS NG). This distro is just making it easier for people to add to existing devices.
Besides, not everyone is comfortable with a GPL license for libraries and being dependent on any company for licensing defeats one key advantage of F/OSS -- vendor lockin and being held hostage to the demands of a single company. If TrollTech (or any licensing company) ever got greedy you'd have to pay up. If they died, changed businesses, or just refused to sell to you, you'd be in trouble unless you went GPL (which you might not be able to do if you licensed other things or you might not be able to do without a shareholder/vendor capitalist revolt). If you're going to go with licensing, you might as well go to something multivendor, like J2ME, where vendor lockin is a lot less of a problem.
Besides, believe it or not, some people like Gtk+ better than Qt, just as some people prefer FLTK or FLTK/LUA or wxWidgets or wxWidgets/Python to either Gtk+ or Qt.
Choice is good. It's why most of us left Windows and "One Microsoft Way".
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"And Hildon IS proprietary (at least it was until I last checked)."
http://lwn.net/Articles/230906/
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Linux already runs on ds: http://www.dslinux.org/
trouble is, there's not really much ram left over to do anything else when you have DSLinux running, so no X11.
Without buying a separate ram pack (opera or other) there isn't much you can do with it. It's more of a novelty than anything else. The DS had two cpus but they are an arm7@33mhz and an arm9@66mhz, only 4MB of ram shared between the two, and limitations about what each cpu can do (e.g. only arm9 can access graphics engine)
I'm not sure how feasible funning this on a DS is, but I would love to be proved wrong.
edit: apparently nano-X has been ported to DSLinux. I'm still not convinced it would very usably, and it crashes when I try to run it. I think it's out of ram (i have no rampack)
Edited 2007-08-03 12:26
