The ball is rolling!

*Taps microphone* Is this thing on?
Hello? Hello? Hello? Ah yeah...

Anyway, coming to you from #openinkpot, here are the latest news!

Progress on OpenInkpot by the core members (dottedmag, and jekhor) has been quiet lately owing to their busy schedule.

But all is not quiet. The OpenInkpot/GSoc students have been hard at work investigating their chosen projects.

Zhang Wenjie - Sony PRS-5xx port.

Unfortunately, due to the recent Sichuan earthquake, Wenjie has not gotten his Sony Reader yet. However, he is hard at work investigating support for various components that make up the hardware in the Linux system - which is essential to getting OpenInkpot to run on the Sony Reader.
Ondrej Herman - Bookeen Cybook port.
Ondrej has been able to find the serial port on the Cybook, and has managed to dump the original firmware for further analysis. However, he is in danger of being overtaken by a rival on the horizon - roxfan! (See below).
Alex Kerner - FBReader and EFL port.
Finally, but not least, LunohoD has managed to get FBReader ported to OpenInkpot already! However, it is lacking a GUI at the moment whilst he moves on to working on the EFL libraries. For those unfamiliar with EFL, it is basically a GUI manager - similar to Gnome, KDE, and Windows!

However, OpenInkpoter regular - roxfan, (a.k.a. igorsk on mobileread) has been hard at work on tweaking the Bookeen Cybook firmware to allow it to run on the Netronix EB-100 and the STAReBook, as well as other book readers that use the same hardware internally. This has provoked a fast and furious debate on the legalities of installing the Cybook firmware on other ebook reader, as well as the viral nature of the GPL.

Whilst this does not have any direct influence on OpenInkpot, this is a very welcome development, as it proves that once OpenInkpot is ready for the Bookeen Cybook platform, it can easily be ported to other ebook readers based on the same hardware.

If you have any questions or information you want to see on this blog, just come on in - the water's warm!

Till next time...