Re: GPE 3.0

Salut Guillaume,

On Wed, 2006-11-01 at 00:08 +0100, Guillaume FORTAINE wrote:
>  I am French Engineer in Informatics and I would want to build a start
>  up to  manufacture mobile phones ( OEM level ). I am currently in discussion 
> with investors.

Good luck!

> We would want to use the GPE environment but we will need to complete it to 
> have a "commercial grade" one.
> 
> Here are our goals :
> 
> Finish this :
> 
> http://handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/GpeThingsTodo
> 
> Mail : sylpheeds UI to 240*320

I think Florian is already working on a new mail client using tinymail
which might be more powerful.

> +
> 
> Porting Gpe to use ALSA.

Well in a sense it does not matter what sound system GPE uses, as there
are very little applications using sound. I believe ALSA support is
working when it is needed

> Porting Matchbox to use AIGLX .

Well are you sure you are going to do that stuff on a phone???

> Porting Gpe-mini-browser to use Webkit.

It is either fixing gtk-webcore or porting webkit to GTK+. Once there
are GTK+ bindings it should be relatively simple to use it on
gpe-mini-browser and start expanding it.

> Mini-Totem with GStreamer Backend ( 320*240 ).

I once have been digging in the totem source code and believe it will be
faster to write a new mediaplayer with gstreamer that fits on such a
screen than to actually adapt totem.

> We believe that we will be able to speak of GPE 3.0. :) 
> 
> How many people/much time ( full-time developers) are/is needed to success in 
> this enterprise ? 

I cannot really answer this, but it sounds like a lot of work, and a lot
depends on the quality of the people you are going to work with.

> What is the best background they need to have to work on this ? ( C, GTK , 
> Linux ? )

GTK+, GNU/Linux, C and preferable experience with embedded devices and
ARM architecture.

> It's a million dollars project and the stuff will be released under GPL.

That would be really great :-) Keep us updated.

Regards,

Philippe