New software for an old BUG

While the BUG 2.0 hardware platform is the shiney new toy everyone wants/NEEEDS, what can we say about our trusty BUG 1.x devices sitting around?  I think they are in need of some love, and as a community effort, have released some alpha-level builds of BUG 2.0 software for BUG 1.x hardware.  The project is called leafcutter, and the idea is that your BUG 1.3 device should be able to run all the BUGapps that your 2.0 device does, assuming you have the necessary modules.  The main work involved in this is migrating from the legacy Poky 3.0 build system to the OpenEmbedded 2011-stable build system.  The result of this migration means:

• Up to date packages
• A “living” distro, where contributors are adding packages all the time
• OSGi R4 implementation (Apache Felix)
• OpenJDK (Java 1.6)

I’m planning on having Dragonfly SDK support available, so development is seemless between hardware versions.  Have a look at the project page to see the current state of things.  Since this is not an official Bug Labs project, the sources are being hosted at Gitorious instead of the Bug Labs GitHub repo.  While the project is in an early stage, the basic Linux environment and OpenJDK JVM are currently working.  Depending on your needs, this may already be enough for some users to migrate.

And as a community-hosted project, everyone is welcome to contribute!  Areas that need attention:

• Abstracting and isolating BUG 2.0 HW APIs from 1.3 HW APIs in the OSGi layer
• Fixing and enhancing the windowing system
• Providing an ‘extras’ package repository
• Testing kernel and module support
• Testing existing BUGapps on BUG 1.3 hardware

The start page has all the details regarding building and getting access to ready-to-install binaries.