Monday, August 31, 2009

Woo! Vacation! Woo!

Well, I just returned from vacation, and man am I feeling refreshed! Pretty short stint out, but well worth it nonetheless.

Living in the great Northwest is amazing, especially when things like the San Juan islands are practically in your back yard. As you might imagine, that's where we spent the weekend. We went on a two-day sea-kayaking trip that took us from Friday Harbor around many of the islands there, finally stopping at Stuart Island. We set up camp there and took a nice 5-mile hike to a beautiful view of the sunset, overlooking the sound. It was, well, see for yourself:


And, we saw Orcas! Lots of 'em! We didn't manage to get any good pictures of them, but someone else in our group did. I'll post some of them up once we have them. Also, starfish!

All credit goes to my lovely wife Tess for the pictures.

So now that we're back home, we'll be getting back into things as usual. Some good news to report on the Wing Linux end, it looks like HTC Opal and HTC Pharos support is coming along nicely, with touchscreen support having been implemented by their respective developers. Take a look at the forums for the Pharos and Opal to get in on some of that. Also, the Excalibur development has progressed, with a working directional pad now.

We're looking to put out a fourth development release of 0.4 pretty soon -- hopefully we can get the Pharos, Opal, and new Excalibur support in. Also, Elf and Elfin owners will be happy to learn the latest development kernel code fixes all issues with the keypad. Check here for Elf development, and also the new xda-developers thread started here. Lots of good stuff.

Soon, our project is going to take a little of a direction change. Up to now, we've been on the 2.6.25 kernel, holding things pretty steady. But we'd like to get our stuff moved into the main-line kernel so we don't have to keep maintaining separate development efforts from main kernel work. So, after the next development release, we're going to start working hard with the linwizard project (who's work made our project possible) to get all the changes we've made pushed into the main-line kernel. We'll still accept patches against the 2.6.25 kernel and keep that going, but we're going to focus our attention more at the upstream port work. Should be fun, and it should get us a better path towards upgrading to Android Donut -- not to mention things like power management, sound, and wifi support for a bunch of devices (hopefully).

As always, stay tuned. :)

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Releases, Devices, Support, Oh My!

It's been rather hectic lately for the Wing Linux project since we did our most recent development release. What started as a small little project to try and get Linux and Android running on a Herald has turned into seemingly something much bigger -- we've got requests coming in for all kinds of device support now. Gene, Artemis, Opal, Elf and Elfin...whew! Sometimes I find myself having trouble keeping up with it all.

...Especially being one of the only developers on the project.

Now that the focus of the project has opened up a bit, I'm finding it more and more difficult to keep up. I posted a help wanted on Sourceforge recently for anyone willing to put in some time to maintain the project for their particular device. If you're reading this and thinking you'd like to help, check it out -- I could use all the help I can get. Even help with answering questions on the forums would take a huge load off of me, but if you can write a little C code and are intersted in learning, we'd be glad to have you.

We're looking to start supporting more and more devices in the future. There's a lot of OMAP850-based devices out there, and I can't do it alone. Care to join? :)

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Moving along...

So, we've somewhat changed the focus of the project.

No longer are we specifically targeting the Wing/Herald. We are now targeting OMAP850 based devices, in general. We aim to get a working and useful Linux and Android userspace on these devices.

We're nearing the 0.4pre3 release, which may be a release candidate.

HTC Gene/HTC Opal support is coming along nicely, and may be included soon.

We have a lot to look forward to, so stay tuned!