GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative Announced

Jeff Waugh, of the GNOME Foundation made an announcement at the Embedded Linux Conference in Santa Clara. Calif. CELF's Embedded Linux Conference is the first forum for embedded Linux developers and associated software from around the world where they can get together in technical discussions regarding all kinds of matters such as the latest development perspectives and projects for expanded development.

According to linux.com website, Jeff Waugh talked about the GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative (GMAE). As Jeff Waugh states, the initiative was in development since a year ago and it takes in a series of GNOME technologies used on a Linux desktop such as the GTK+ toolkit, the Gstreamer multimedia framework, Telepathy, Avahi network service discovery, Evolution Data Server for contacts and calendaring, and BlueZ Bluetooth support. He also mentioned that the GMAE initiative has defined a platform which will provide APIs for C, C++ and Python developers and has also brought a new vendor patched for mobiles and embedded functionality. This platform is said to already be present in the Nokia N770 and N800 Web tablets, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, and the OpenMoko Neo1973 mobile phone.

The platform is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and during the next 12 months, the GMAE working team intends to add a mobile email framework, called Tinymail, the GeoClue geolocation service, Java Mobile & Embedded (Java ME), PulseAudio audio management, and the HAL hardware information system.

David Schlesinger, director of open source technologies for ACCESS stated they have managed to gather players working on GNOME technologies in embedded and mobile devices. The group encountered some problems with the adoption of the GTK+ toolkit current version on the Cairo machines that were not equipped with floating point processors. The group considers now working on a solution to provide better Cairo performance on other processors.