GSoC2008: accepted applications

GSoC 2008 is very promising for OpenInkpot: we've got three slots for a students, and three very interesting applications.

I'm happy to introduce our students and scope of ther GSoC work:

• Alexander Egorov (aka LunohoD), porting FBReader to OI


• Ondřej Herman, Cybook Gen3 support


• Wenjie Zhang, Sony PRS-505 support

I also posted announcement in our mailing list: link.

Welcome Slind.

I blogged about the problems with OI buildsystem. Some time ago we discussed it in IRC chat and xl0 suggested to take a second look at Slind.

After looking at sources and chatting with Slind developers we decided that it really worth to try it: Slind provides very controlled build environment by leveraging Debian build tools and extending them to the cross-build.

I bootstraped ARM EABI toolchain for Slind (not yet available - I had to add crude hack to dpkg to do it :), and soon will be publishing both patches back to the Slind and source/binary packages for the OpenInkpot.

Slind has it's own problems - it is very young and has much less userbase than OpenEmbedded, so we will have to package many pieces of software. Fortunately, it is as easy as taking Debian package, stripping all the unnecessary stuff and making it cross-compile (yeah, might not be as easy as it sounds :).

P.S.: GSoC information in next post.