Mer/Status/FreeRunner

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 Mer is back : Please visit http://www.merproject.org to learn more about this news.


This is the planning page to have Mer working on the freerunner.

Mer on Freerunner is 100% ported, thanks to the people at Debian, we reused most of the work. For 100% we mean that Mer works without any mayor problem in it

We used the kernel from pkg-fso which is the lastest stable kernel released from Openmoko.

There are still some things to do to better support Mer for the Freerunner:

  1. Build/Find a good keybaord - done by him-arabic maybe
  2. Port the FSO packages into Mer Freerunner repository
  3. Run zhone as example and check the phone stack
  4. Build hildon compatible applets for Mer


Contents

[edit] Download & install

[edit] Build/Find a good keyboard

More testing is needed in the him-arabic package to provide a good, final keyboard for freerunner like systems. Vincenzo Ampolo (goshawk) <vincenzo@eshopen.com> is working on it, but help is much appreciated, just join to #mer in irc.freenode.net and ping him! :)

The tests should see how flexible is him-arabic and see if it looks good on freerunner.

-- Since Maemo or Mer are widescreen designed, would the current keyboard work if the screen is used in landscape rather than portrait mode?

-- Is there a possibility to write a HIM plugin, which switches the HIM-UI to landscape and full-screen mode? Then one can write a plugin with a "inputline"-text-field and more space for the letter-keys. Also I think a keyboard with only letters and numbers and special chars on a extra page would be good. In the end it would look like the keyboard used in SHR except it is in landscape and full-screen mode.

[edit] Port the FSO packages into Mer Freerunner repository

While all the things related to Mer have already been ported, the packages of the Phone stack (fso) and other applications have not yet ported. Luckly we can reuse most of the work of the Debian FSO team. The repository can be found here and the deb lines are: 

deb http://pkg-fso.alioth.debian.org/debian unstable main
deb-src http://pkg-fso.alioth.debian.org/debian unstable main

This is the list of applications that need a port into the Mer archive

This should be almost a trivial task since the sources in a debian like format are available.

[edit] Run zhone as example and check the phone stack

This can be done after #2

[edit] Build hildon compatible applets for Mer

This can be done after #3

[edit] Debian Armel Virtual Machine for Mer development

Aurel32 have done a virtual machine image of Debian for arm under qemu. You can download it and run with the command: 

qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb -kernel vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-versatile -initrd initrd.img-2.6.26-2-versatile -hda debian_lenny_arm_small.qcow -append "root=/dev/sda1" -nographic

The nographic option will open a shell of your armel machine directly in the shell in which you run the command. So you can easily copy and paste commands

[edit] Imager

The imager is one of the most useful things in mer development, it's a script that build a rootfs image for any Mer target, since Mer runs in a lot of devices, each device require a particular kernel or packages so an image for Freerunner can contain more or less packages than another image for another device.

The imager is hosted in launchpad. To run it you have to set up a debian armel environment, you can use a ready virtual machine to accomplish it. To get the imager code, install the git-core package in the virtual machine and run the command 

git clone git://gitorious.org/mer/imager.git

or you can run this command on a desktop machine and then transfer the imager code to the Freerunner. Then you should install the debootstrap package in the virtual machine and run the imager with the command: 

bash imager targets/mer-freerunner-fs-only directory

where directory is the directory in which the image will be build. Remember that you have to set up a debian armel virtual machine to do it

[edit] misc

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