Tosa Development Plan, where should dev effort go Options

[xjqian]

As most of your know the 6000L is an odd breed compared to other Zauri, esp the clamshells, where availability and dev activities are high. Hence Tosa ROM version is behind others except for OZ/Angstrom where the key dev. Hrw has the device.

Current Tosa ROM status in the other popular rom is pretty disappointing

PdaXrom: beta1
Cacko: None

I've been whining for a long time without contributing. Part of the reason is that I don't know where should my effort go. I have to admit that I'm not even close to software engineer in trade and pretty inexperienced in the whole thing. But I'm pretty confident in my learning ability to get some Tosa dev going.

For a starter, I'm interested to advance PdaXrom to a stable/usable 2.4 kernel, similar to what Meanie did for pdaXii. (weed out bugs, etc. ) Who else is interested and have time to contribute? We probably need some sort of infrastructure (svn, emaillist, bugtracker, etc.) Could we borrow what's available in the PdaXrom site? Should we get together and form a team?

Btw, anybody interested in a Cacko ROM for Tosa?

I can probably commit half an hour per day for the project after my thesis defense.

[radiochickenwax]

Here are some funny links related to this thread:

Why Users Should Not Exist

UNIX Hater's Handbook

Help Wanted For CLISP


The following is quoted from the last link above:

The prizes for handling these issues:

    * handle one issue and you will get CVS write access;
    * handle two issues and you become an admin of the CLISP project;
    * handle three or more issues and you become the principal maintainer.

This reminds me of a joke: after the 1991 Russian coup attempt (which lead to the final downfall of communism), the Communist Party was very unpopular and tried to increase the membership by asking its members to recruit new members, with the following incentives:

    * if you bring one new member, you don't have to pay membership dues
    * if you bring two new members, you may resign from the Party
    * if you bring three new members, you may resign and you will also receive a certificate that you have never been a member of the Party!"

Please note, I'm not trying to be negative about this, I just found all of the above humorous. I'm still very much committed to the idea of an open source ROM for tosa that would combine the stability of OZ and Sharp with the usability of pdaXrom.

Personally, I'm not very happy with angstrom or OZ out of the box. GPE has never worked all that well for me as a window system compared to pdaXrom's more standard setup. It's a great idea for a PDA, but I didn't buy the zaurii to run an open source version of WinCE which IMHO is probably the worst interface I've ever used.

What I'd like to know is how to make OZ/Angstrom "feel" more like a standard desktop system. pdaXrom does the best job of that task, but there are obviously a lot of issues with the rom beyond that point, which is why we even have this thread in the first place.

For me, I'm still harboring this notion that I should be able to build the whole rom from scratch natively, with a minimal amount of patching of the original author's sources, something like the slackware distribution.

I suppose angstrom/OZ might be more to my liking if I were to try to start at least with the console image, and try to roll my window system from there, but building the x-window system has always been something of a nightmare for me.

[koen]

I suppose angstrom/OZ might be more to my liking if I were to try to start at least with the console image, and try to roll my window system from there, but building the x-window system has always been something of a nightmare for me.

As opposed to pdaX, angstrom and OZ already have a shitload of packages in the feeds[1], so no need to compile or build sutff, just 'ipkg install <whatever>' and be happy.

[1] and everything is in a central place as well, so no need to add a zillion feeds and open a zillion forum threads with "can't find dep <foo> PLZ ADD!!!!11!11!one!"