Open development/Maemo roadmap/Fremantle

Fremantle is the codename of the Maemo 5 release. It comes after Maemo 4.1 (Diablo) and before Harmattan.

Contents

Fremantle timeline

This is a timeline based on known events and announcements. Many dates are quite flexible at this point.

  • 2008-06-01: "Fremantle" codename announced in LinuxTag 2008. See maemo LinuxTag update.
  • 2008-09-17: First annoucements in OSiM World: OSiM News: What's up with Maemo? (Ari Jaaksi, Head of Maemo Software @ Nokia) & Get ready for 2009!OSiM World 2008 (Erkko Anttila, Maemo SW Fremantle product manager, and Quim Gil, Maemo SW open source advocate).
  • 2008-09-19: More announcements in the Maemo Summit 2008 - Summary: What can we get out of Fremantle (slides) (video), by Peter Schneider (Maemo SW head of product marketing)
  • 2008-12-08: First pre-alpha SDK and first report on API changes. Suitable for platform development only.
  • 2009-01-29 Second pre-alpha SDK with Media Application Framework and more new platform components.

Expected:

  • Plan for a presentation in FOSDEM FOSDEM about Fremantle running in the BeagleBoard.
  • Plan for a mature alpha SDK with new Hildon application framework and API freeze available around February 2009.
  • Bossa conference in March. Maemo activities tbd.
  • Beta SDK released between March-May, ready for application development including support for Mozilla based browser and Greasemonkey add-ons.
  • Qt 4.4 "garage" support and Theme Maker by Urho Konttori planned to be ready by the beta SDK release.
  • Final release when ready.  :)

New

  • OMAP3 support
  • HSPA/3G support
  • High definition camera support
  • OpenGL ES
  • Clutter
  • Meta Tracker
  • PulseAudio
  • GUPnP
  • OHM
  • upstart
  • A2DP & AVRCP support
  • OpenMAX

Changes

Toolkit

  • New and updated Hildon/Gtk widgets.
  • Gtk 2.0 library upgraded to version 2.12
  • Glib upgraded to 2.16
  • Pango upgraded to 1.20
  • Cairo upgraded to 1.6.4
  • gcc upgraded to 4.2

UI Framework

Fremantle introduces a new UI framework which uses Clutter OpenGL library. It provides the following functionality:

  • Window manager
  • Task Launcher
  • Task switcher
  • Home view
  • Status menu and status area
  • New Hildon notification API for handling desktop notifications.

Media Application Framework

A new framework that provides high-level components to developers to ease the task of writing media player applications by abstracting them from the details of low-level components. Thus, it allows them to focus on the UI design and development. The framework also eases the development of 3rd party plugins, similar to GStreamer, but on a higher level.

Data management

Tracker introduced to replace libmetalayer.

Connectivity

BlueZ

BlueZ updated to version 4.x. Brings along a major redesign of the D-Bus API and local bluetooth service framework. The main benefit of this change is decreased code complexity both on the BlueZ and the application side due to a much simpler API.

osso-gwconnect

Removed since identical functionality has been a part of Bluez core since Chinook.

Samba

Samba support to be dropped.

ClinkC

ClinkC deprecated in favour of GUPnP. The following main advantages have been identified to support this transition:

  • Designed specifically for Maemo.
  • Much simpler design/api compared to ClinkC or any other UPnP library.
  • Uses glib's main loop for waiting on sockets rather than launching several threads that adds lots of unneeded complexity and therefore introduces lots of hard-to-kill bugs.

Location framework

Changes tbd.

Multimedia

  • Gstreamer OpenMax wrapper on freedesktop.org.
  • New GStreamer plugin introduced that wraps openmax-il components under the gstreamer API.
  • OpenMax plugins for all the codecs.
  • No DSP sink and sources anymore.
  • esound replaced by libcanberra.
  • Speex introduced.
  • GUPnP introduced.

System SW

  • initfs isn't used anymore
  • Device startup handled by Upstart instead of sysvinit. Location and format of init scripts differ.
  • OHM introduced as a policy framework mainly for audio in addition to dsme and mce components, which are responsible for device state and mode control.
  • Profile API : A new client library (libprofile) and daemon (profiled) introduced for accessing profile settings.
  • Alarm API's updated: The number and functionality of API interface functions remains roughly the same as before. The usage (parameters passed) and underlying transfer protocol (dbus messages) are changed substantially.
  • BusyBox updated to 1.10.2 (or newer?).

SDK

  • GCC updated to 4.x. Stricter checks for C and C++ code.

RTCom

  • Farsight API break: Farsight upgraded/re-written to farsight2.
  • Telepathy: libtelepathy outdated. Use telepathy-glib instead.
  • Evolution-data-server dropped.
  • libgalago and galago-daemon dropped.

Window manager

Window manager upgraded to matchbox-window-manager-2


Enhancement requests implemented

ProductComponentIDSummary
XournalUI12279No more adding when reaching Last page

Bugs fixed

ProductComponentIDSummary (3 tasks)
PyMaemoGeneral4782osso.Context causes segmentation fault
XournalUI12058When the device is lying on a flat surface, the McE may wrongly report the device is rotated.
XournalUI5965ruled line toggle state gets confused