hackable:1 (and then more)

Pierre Pronchery

DUEKIN Consulting

Who am I?

• business-wise, freelance IT-Security consultant based in Berlin
• been however advocating for Hackable Devices for a while with Bearstech
• otherwise, Open Source developer
• and then, probably ambitious: writing my own Operating System

I'll come to that last part later :)

About hackable:1

• situation: August 2008, reselling the brand-new Openmoko Freerunner
• the Openmoko software stack was already in an undetermined state:
  • Om2007.2 (Opened-Hand) was abandoned
  • Om2008.8 (ASU) was just released (and didn't look like much)
  • SHR was just announced as a mix of both
  • DebianOnFreerunner just happened
• we needed to propose a working environment for the devices!

hackable:1 as GNOME Mobile

• our (@Bearstech) conviction was to stick with GNOME Mobile
• common experience as Debian advanced users (if not developers)
• decided to package and maintain the Om2007.2 stack, with a Debian base

What is GNOME Mobile?

• an initiative, really
• rather, a collection of technologies from the GNOME project
• then combined and shipped in different ways, in a number of projets

The challenges

• not reinventing the wheel
• being able to maintain our distribution with our resources
• contributing back
• grow as a community
• and technical, too...

What hackable:1 really is

• a collection of additional packages:
  • directly from pkg-fso (but re-compiled for stable)
  • patched for our own needs
  • missing software from Om2007.2
• a script to generate pre-configured images:
  • for respective devices (Neo1973, GTA02...)
  • for different mediums (embedded flash memory, external MicroSD cards...)
  • with various purposes (user, developer, cross-compilation environments)

Issues with Debian

• we needed to be developers in the first place
• slow package integration process (but stable work environment!)
• volunteer-based work (undetermined delays...)

And then again, we had our own constraints too of course (business projects, research groups, customer support...)

In practice (1)

Creating and maintaining packages

• cross-compilation partly supported:
  • dpkg-buildpackage -a<arch>
  • libtool patch
  • dh_strip, dh_shlibdeps don't work
• more patches required:
  • apt (!) for mmap() on JFFS2
  • pkg-config for staging directories

In practice (2)

Generating pre-configured images

• debootstrap only works natively (and with one packagesource)
• likewise, {pre,post}-install scripts only run natively

So we had to:

• script package uncompression without apt (with dependencies!)
• register packages correctly in /var/lib/apt/{available,status} (likewise)
• reproduce some of the configuration scripts (most had to anyway)

The situation today

• five releases within about a year
• we got many users at some point
• development community did not really grow though
• focus of Bearstech on Hackable Devices themselves
• meanwhile... lone developer (servitor)

Plan? What plan?

• the next release was planned to be based on FSO
• but from their own developers' opinion, Squeeze's packages are not enough
• as for myself... trying another way

Re-inventing the wheel

It may look like that, but I beg to differ.

• writing my own GSM telephony application
• based on "simple", readily available technologies (C, Gtk+)
• as fewer dependencies as possible
• code kept as simple as possible (basic core, seamless plug-ins)
• always in development, always in release state
• packaged and tested after every change worth it

The DeforaOS smartphone (1)

• full-featured embedded environment:
  • panel and launcher
  • application and hardware interaction
  • finger-friendly virtual keyboard
  • file manager
  • desktop menu
  • media player (mplayer-based)
  • web browser (Webkit-based)
  • todo-list
  • more coming...

The DeforaOS smartphone (2)

• additional features:
  • SMS encryption
  • engineering/monitoring mode
• potential for more:
  • FSO integration
  • insert your idea here :)

Current issues

• it's mostly me, and me...
• and it's a young project, still
• documentation and useful downloads are in progress

What's next?

• your impressions?
• some testing and your feedback?
• any other questions or remarks?