In the spirit of the recent ideas threads here, I'd like to share my ideas that I would like to achieve with the gta04, as part of a larger system. I wrote it in an article format, and it isn't finished, but nothing ever is. So here goes.
** introduction I'm interested in free client - server clusters, with wearable nodes, and laptop nodes. Free software is pretty strong server side, but somewhat weaker on the client, especially small systems such as phones. It should be possible to leverage the server side strength on the client machines. Since a server is part of the equation, complexity can be offloaded there. The idea is somewhat like an instance of the Google or Apple stack, but personal, running on your own servers, and geared towards making it possible for you to do what you want rather than generating ad revenue streams. ** concretely Okay, so what does that mumbo-jumbo translate to in practice? Concretely I'm working on a Puppet server manifest, that describes all the services one might want to use on the server, and matching client software that runs on the phone and/or laptop. Since the point is that you should not need weeks to set all this up, I make concrete choices. These will not appeal to everyone, but are of course open for discussion. *** flatrate 3G/4G The internet connection is assumed to be flatrate. It's pretty cheap here in Sweden anyway. The connection must of course still be assumed to be intermittent. *** Fedora I'm used to Fedora, so I will use that for a base operating system. *** Puppet Puppet handles the configuration. Puppet can be used on most distributions. *** Nagios Nagios is used for monitoring, so a competetive uptime can be achieved. *** Single sign on The personal cluster consists of many different services. To make them more integrated, the 389 ldap server is used to provide a shared user database, and the different services are configured to authenticate against the 389 instance. *** Dovecot IMAPD Mail is important to the personal cluster. Dovecot is a good imapd. It is lightweight, yet featureful. *** mapping/location data open streetmap maps. A gpsd on the client feeds the cluster with location data. *** instant messaging irc clients on the laptop or phone uses the server as gateway to other systems. Bitlbee is used for the proxy. znc fronts bitlbee, which handles the connections and logging. *** social networks A private diaspora instance is used as mediator. *** voip linphone is used on the client, and asterisk on the server. *** camera All photos are uploaded to the server, and things like bar code scanning etc. can be made server side. *** woodchuck Woodchuck is a system to handle a mobile cache, when the connection to the cluster is down. http://hssl.cs.jhu.edu/~neal/woodchuck/ *** server side transcoding many media formats on the web are not really suitable for mobile applications. The personal cluster handles this by downloading and transcoding the media server side, and then making it accessible to the client. -- Joakim Verona _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community