About one hour ago we have finished the first Openmoko user meeting in Karlsruhe. Twelve FreeRunner (and Neo1973) owners have gatherd in the rooms of Entropia (the local CCC club), and discussed the various distributions, learned aboutt the FSO-alternative PyNeo, which was advocated by Josh, compared GPS applications and talked about various other projects and issues.
I collected some statistics about Distribution usage. Most common was SHR, with five users, followed by OM 2008.12 with three users. Single users had Debian, OM testing from pre 2008.12, PyNeo, EmDebian and OM 2008.9 installed. Only counting those who use their FreeRunner as their day-to-day phone, three are using SHR, one OM 2008.12 and one OM testing. I conclude that SHR seems to be a good choice if you want to have a working phone.
Asked about their primary use case for the FreeRunner, almost all mentioned telephony and GPS. Half of the participants want to use it to browse the web, a little less think that games are important. Two people, who came from Stuttgart, see CellHunter as an important use case
Considering that we filled three hours without running out of topics and the good feedback, we will likely have a sequel to this. A date has not been fixed yet, but will be discussed on the openmoko-community mailing list.
BTW: I’m still planning to package the SHR applications for Debian as soon as possible. Only one dependency (libetk) is missing, but according to Lutin from the pkg-e team, it’s almost ready.
Have something to say? You can post a comment by sending an e-Mail to me at <mail@joachim-breitner.de>, and I will include it here.
Photos