Derick Rethans - tag: openmoko

Autumn Plans

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:26:00 +0000

Autumn Plans

Monday, September 14th 2009, 13:26 BST

I've been missing-in-action on my own blog for some time. Moving to London does that to you. Anyway, I've not been idle in the meanwhile at all, and been working on some cool side-projects. First of all I've been adding some features to Xdebug . Xdebug is now slow reaching beta-status for the 2.1 release. New feature will include proper PHP 5.3 support, variable tracing, "scream" support and other minor features.

Besides Xdebug I've also been hacking on PHP-GTK applications for my phone . The major new thing that I have now is a PHP-GTK twitter client that works like I want it... and I even use it on my desktop instead of all the other stuff that's out there. I will soon be publishing this client in my CVS repository.

Now that the conference season is starting again I'm working on improving several talks, as well as rewriting some parts for them. The first conference that I will be speaking at, are part of "Marco's Crazy PHP Conference Tour" aka CodeWorks . I'll be giving three different talks here, one on "Debugging with Xdebug ", one on PHP's DateTime support and one on "Improving your development process" where I'll be talking about Test-Driven Development and other tricks associated by running a project. As CodeWorks is a bit like a rock-star tour, I'll be keeping a video blog of it somewhere on the intertubes.

pfcongrez, P2P Конференция, php|tek, PHP Vikinger, DPC and eZ Conference and Awards

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 23:45:00 +0000

pfcongrez, P2P Конференция, php|tek, PHP Vikinger, DPC and eZ Conference and Awards

London, UK

Friday, April 10th 2009, 01:45 CEST

The above mentioned conferences all have one thing in common: I'll be speaking. At the first conference, pfcongrez I will be talking on implementing Test Driven Development as a model for software development. A modified version of this talk I will also give at the next conference, P2P Конференция (P2P Conference) in Bulgaria. At this same conference I will be talking on using PHP as development language for GSM based applications on mobile computing platforms running Linux, where I will use the pecl/dbus extension to talk to the interface framework available on the OpenMoko platform. This same talk I will also give at DPC in Amsterdam. In between however I will go to Chicago to speak at php|tek on search technologies in my "Haystacks and Needles" talk and on simple architecture in my KISS talk. Before DPC I will also go to Leuven for PHP Vikinger , an unconference that I'll be organizing for the 3rd time. This year it is no longer in Norway, but instead we moved to Leuven in Belgium. It is also de-coupled from the eZ Conference and Awards which will be in Paris.

PHP on OpenMoko

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 10:04:00 +0000

PHP on OpenMoko

Skien, Norway

Sunday, August 31st 2008, 12:04 CEST

Last week at FrOSCon I received my new Linux computer with GSM chip, the Neo Freerunner . The device comes with all kinds of goodies, such as GSM, GPS, Wifi, Bluetooth, motion sensors and a micro SD slot. The hardware works just fine, but there are some software issues that make the phone not yet usable for my daily use. Improvements for that are on the way though.

You might be wondering, why the is this on Planet-PHP as well. As I mentioned, the Freerunner is basically a Linux computer - which means total freedom of what you install on it. Traditionally it comes with perl and python, including GTK bindings. However, no PHP is found on it. I set out to change that. Unfortunately there were some issues with cross compiling, so I decided to compile PHP * on* the phone. There were some issues with this.

The default distribution comes with BusyBox, which implements many standard Unix commands in one binary - but it doesn't provide the full version. This makes PHP's configure not work. In order to fix this, you can install the "coreutils" package, but that was broken at this time so I had to cross compile coreutils myself (note that you need to have the OpenMoko toolchain installed):

wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-6.12.tar.gz
tar -xvzf coreutils*tar.gz
cd core*
. /usr/local/openmoko/arm/environment-setup
./configure --host=arm-angstrom-linux-gnueabi
make

From the finished compile, I copied head, expr, env and cut to the /usr/bin directory on the OpenMoko. With this done, I could compile PHP and install it to make the headers available for PHP's shared extensions.

After the PHP compile was done, I set out to continue with php-gtk . For this I had to install a few more packages: libglade-dev, libglib-dev and m4. Of both compiles I made packages that you can just install on the OpenMoko: php and php-gtk . In order to demonstrate that it actually works, I've also a demo application "CountDown" available as package .