Category: bongo (Page 3 of 9)
As part of doing some testing of the upcoming Fedora 12 release, I decided to put it on my EeePC 901 netbook. I had a feeling it would be relatively well supported, and indeed the installation was extremely smooth. I was going to also test the work Peter has been doing on the Moblin packages, but instead I got detoured into Gnome-Shell: my Fedora 12 laptop runs Nouveau (no 3D for me!
Years ago, Mitch Kapor invested large sums of money into the OSAF – Open Source Applications Foundation – to come up with a new personal information manager called Chandler. Having burned through the $8 million they got via various means ($5M from Kapor originally), most (all?) of their developers were cut loose early in 2009 as I understand it, leaving the Chandler project – and associated projects – somewhat in limbo.
So, litl has finally broken cover – I had written previously some first thoughts based on the various tid-bits that had leaked, and I thought it might be interesting to follow up on this. Sadly, it doesn’t seem that I had missed anything particularly big: this is supposed to sit like a photo frame in various places in your home, can connect up to a TV but doesn’t really do any multimedia stuff itself, doesn’t have non-wifi wireless, and doesn’t have a touchscreen.
I’ve been waiting for litl to break cover for what seems like forever. The people seem to be all extremely smart, and it sounded like they had such a great idea, even if no-one knew what it was. However, engadget have seen some FCC information on a new “Easel” product from litl – and I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed, because it’s a netbook.
Of course, it almost certainly isn’t.
Let me start this by saying that I really, really want OpenMoko Inc. to be a raging success. With Android, Palm Pre and other “Linux phones” showing pretty how not to do things (jury’s out on N900 for me still), the properly free smartphone is an idea whose time is very definitely here. Sadly, with the freeping creaturism of the phone market and the need to develop both a hardware and software stack simultaneously, that didn’t seem to work out so well, so OM are now going to their backup plan: “WikiReader“.
For various reasons, I’ve been playing with Clutter over the past week. Rather than the 1.0 release that was announced a little while ago, I’m still on 0.8 – for a number of reasons, but mainly because 1.0 isn’t really available in any distro yet, and because the various language bindings are not yet up to date. LWN has a pretty decent write-up of the 1.0 release (subscriber only for the next week).
Recently, we changed the build system of Bongo – we’ve moved away from autotools. This isn’t to say that autotools is necessarily that deficient, but the new CMake system we’re using is a lot more suitable for our kind of project. This has brought some immediate benefits – much simpler build system, much quicker compiles and installations (‘make install’ in particular is now much faster), and a slightly simpler source tree.
As I drove to a business planning session (a.k.a. entrepreneur funday) this morning, I heard on the radio that Google had announced their intention to release a consumer operating system. This was interesting news, albeit too brief, and being at this event I wasn’t able to check the news until I got back this evening.
Pretty much the first thing I read was Andrew Savory‘s take on this. Wow, how disappointing.
It has been interesting watching the debate around Mono over the past few months. As essentially an independent observer – albeit one who has used Mono and can almost code C# – I couldn’t help the sneaking feeling that somehow, some of this was being orchestrated behind the scenes.
Particularly on the “anti-Mono” side, it has been pretty clear that an agenda of agitation has been in effect, with various distributions being prodded into making statements either way and various “users” kicking up stink on mailing lists – not least a certain infamous blog writer being caught red-handed whilst goading people on to write angry letters.
I did promise Lance that I would blog more on Bongo, and I’m going to try to stick to a post a week at least – however, this first one will only tangentially be about Bongo.
Since the project was initially released, the autotools build system was what you needed to create Bongo. There are a variety of benefits to using autotools, and it’s an extremely well-tested and mature system. However, it’s also relatively difficult to understand and not particularly quick.
