Day: May 23, 2007

Fixed the OLPC build of Tinymail

While preparing my OLPC laptop for LinuxTag, I noticed some glitches in the OLPC build of Tinymail. These have now all been fixed and the demo-ui will run and work as-is. You will of course need to edit your $HOME/.xinitrc to override the “exec sugar” with an “exec xterm”, start matchbox-windowmanager and then the Tinymail demoui binary.

You can also try to use the development console which is accessible when typing the [alt]+[=] key combination. But I found it quite hard to make the application usable this way (it gets pushed to the back by the Sugar window manager or something).

The demoui is indeed not suitable nor has already been made suitable as a typical Sugar application. I would of course welcome attempts at this.

To compile do this on any typical x86 computer:

./autogen.sh --with-platform=olpc --prefix=/opt/tinymail-olpc
make && sudo make install

Now tar /opt/tinymail-olpc and untar it into the same directory on your device’s root filesystem.

After deployment follow these instructions for creating an account and in the xterm just launch /opt/tinymail-olpc/bin/demoui.

It’ll ask you for the password each time. I haven’t yet found which password storage API is going to be used on the laptop, so the platform specific implementation is just going to call a GtkDialog box that will each time ask you for the password.

Time for the GPE team to seek legal counsel?

Although the GPE project authors and contributors recently moved their hosting needs to linuxtogo, some handhelds.org administrators believe that they personally own the projects that are or were hosted there. A person who goes by the name France George decided to trademark GPE, Opie ad IPKG.

Unluckily Mr. France started to work with these trademarks already even if they are not assigned yet:

  • The OpieII project had to change its name.
  • Contributors were threatened and urged to give up the name GPE
  • The GPE IRC channel (#gpe) at freenode.net was hijacked
  • Freenode staff members were threatened when they decided to give #gpe back

I hope free software supporters with legal knowledge from all over the world will offer their skills to the people who worked on the many excellent GPE components. Let’s not allow people to steal project names.

Florian Boor, one of the GPE developers, blogged in “Threatened, how do we protect our projects” the open question to all of you: How do we get the affected projects out of this situation? Or maybe even more important: How can we reduce the risk for something like this happening again?