there is less than two weeks left for this year’s LinuxTag Call For Papers.
The event takes place in Berlin, Germany during early summer.

The program committee hopes to fill some of the slots in the Mobile & Embedded
track with Maemo related talks. So feel free to submit a talk!

http://www.linuxtag.org/2010/en/program/call-for-papers.html

Submit a talk

So, whats the state and what can we expect? We can build and run the full OpenJDK on all of our ARM/Linux platforms. The build receipts are in our SVN. The OpenJDK is not very fast, because there is currently no JIT-compiler support for ARM in the HotSpot runtime. So, there is much work left for the next year: JIT compiler, downsizing the JDK, testing it with SUNs TCK and perhaps name it Java afterwards

Much thanks to Robert Schuster and Ken Gilmer for all their great work!

I had a talk about ‘mobile development platforms’ from the free software developers view point. The talk had a very good resonance and much people agreed with me about the big need for more standards between the platforms and for more cross platform development solutions. See my slides: PDF version

For more info read the original posting from robert.

• This year, we had a common Mobile and Embedded booth, next to the OpenMoko and Trolltech booth.
• We had a very nice Maemo track, with a great discussion at the end. Especially Simon had very direct ideas in improving the community situation in Maemo (are your slides already online?)
• Our jalimo project got a very good resonance by much visitors.

You can see the jalimo slides of my talk, here.

View Video

L4 is a microkernel which allows a clean separation and isolation of tasks. It is applicable for realtime or trusted computing scenarios, where special tasks have to be executed in a isolated environment with higher control. Fiasco, the L4 implementation from Dresden is able to run a complete Linux on top of it. So the vision is to run OpenMoko as one L4-Task of the OpenMoko and encapsulate security sensible parts (e.g. GSM control, network stack) in separate tasks.

Unfortunately the armv4 instruction set makes virtualization very expensive, so this vision may take until we get free phones with an armv6 . The Fiasco L4 implementation is GPLv2. The Neo port is not published yet, but this is planed.

Jalimo is a project for enhancing the Java support across the different mobile&embedded distributions. Over the years Robert Schuster and I where missing continuous Java support in the Linux mobile distributions, we were playing with. Off course there was always a way to get a free JVM running but no one was searching and solving the problems, Java programmers had on targeting those devices. As we also noticed the need for a Java mobile platform in our company, we started Jalimo (approx. one year ago).

Since the beginning of the project we had maemo and OpenMoko in focus, as the primary target platforms. They have different toolchains (Scratchbox vs. OpenEmbedded), which both had no proper Java support. After a period of experimenting we now have a very clean Java support and support for generating maemo packages in OpenEmbedded. So now, beyond maemo and OpenMoko, all the other OpenEmbedded based distributions can use those recipes too, so that we don’t have to redo the work for others.

OpenEmbedded is great for generating a complete distribution but will most likely never be the tool of choice for a usual Java application developer. Those people nowadays mostly use maven. For this reason we have created a packaging plugin for maven. This plugin allows a Java developer to generate .deb or .ipkg packages out of a usual maven project, using a single command. Since the plugin has special support for our target platforms, it allows a smooth integration e.g. it translates the maven dependencies to clean distribution dependencies. With this, we hope, any Java developer can write and deploy Linux mobile apps without changing their used toolchain.

The main packages of Jalimo (which are already integrated in the official OpenMoko repositories) consist of: cacao, gnu classpath and SWT (with GTK peer) for the GUI. This is a set which fulfils the most common requirements, but we support alternatives and additional packages in our extra repositories. e.g. jamvm (with a faster startup), midpath, Swing, java-gnome bindings (unfortunately no recent version), java-dbus and some more. If you like to see support for something not included, please get in touch! For example sometimes I think we also should include the Sun PhoneME, to show the people that we also could choose a very fast JVM, if we want to but since it seems, that nobody needs it, we don’t have done this integration for now.