Monday 12 May 2008

First day at OpenMoko

Today is my first working day at OpenMoko.

After I met my new coworkers - I will need some time to get used to all the new faces - I started to play with the Neo FreeRunner. So I followed the wiki instructions to flash my cell phone with the last kernel and file system image. It worked fine :-)

Of course, since I am a fan of python and gtk, the second thing I tried was to run a python / gtk / glade application. And the proof that it works with no problem :

Here is a screenshot of glade designer running on my laptop :
And here is the same interface running on the Neo FreeRunner, from a python script :

This is pretty cool. The only problem is that the menu bar looks a little bit too small for a screen touch interface.

6 comments:

Vincent de Grandpré said...

Salut Guillaume, je lis ton blogue et je développe.. du moins j'essais!

Je ne connais pas python et je n'ai qu'une mini base de GTK, mais ça s'en vient.

J'ai essayé de faire fonctionner Python sur mon Neo mais malheureusement j'ai tout utilisé l'espace disponible et je dois repartir mon système de fichiers à zéro..

du reste, python me semble le langage à utiliser pour développer rapidement pour OpenMoko, je me trompe?

Guillaume Chéreau said...

Oui python est idéal pour OpenMoko car étant interprété il n'est pas nécessaire de compiler les programmes. Il suffit juste de copier les fichiers sur le téléphone et tu peux les éxécuter.

Il existe de nombreuses libraries python qui peuvent être pré-installées dans OpenMoko, et c'est suffisant pour la majorité des applications.

lynn said...

Hi, do you think you could leave the steps you used to create the gui on the openmoko? I would love to see how you did it. Thanks!

Guillaume Chéreau said...

Hello Lynn, I didn't keep the code I used for this gui. But it is very simple. Just write a normal python gtk application on your desktop computer (you can check this tutorial : http://www.learningpython.com/2006/05/07/creating-a-gui-using-pygtk-and-glade/)
Then copy the file on the phone and run it.
The way it will look depends of the gtk engine installed on your neo.

lynn said...

Actually, my problem is that I can't figure out how to work with the gtk engine on the neo. I don't think I installed it correctly, but I don't know how to remedy that. I have the gtk-2.0 and gtk modules on my phone, and my PYTHONPATH includes a path to those locations:

['', '/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages', '/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gtk-2.0/gtk', '/usr/lib/python25.zip', '/usr/lib/python2.5', '/usr/lib/python2.5/plat-linux2', '/usr/lib/python2.5/lib-tk', '/usr/lib/python2.5/lib-dynload', '/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gtk-2.0']

Sorry for bothering you with trouble shooting on your blog :) I hope you don't mind!

Guillaume Chéreau said...

Lynn, could you send an email to openmoko mailing list about this problem, with a copy of the output you get ?
You can register from there :
http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community