GPE Palmtop Environment
Encyclopedia
GPE is a graphical user interface
environment for handheld computers, such as palmtops and personal digital assistant
s (PDAs), running the Linux
operating system. GPE is a complete environment of software components and applications which makes it possible to use a Linux handheld for tasks such as personal information management
(PIM), audio playback, email, and web browsing.
Available under the terms of the GNU General Public License
and the GNU Lesser General Public License
, GPE is free software
.
s targeting the following platforms:
In addition, GPE maintainers and the open source community are developing ports for additional devices:
On February 5, 2007, The GPE project announced GPE Phone Edition, a new variant of GPE developed for mobile phones.
GPE is a X Window System
based GUI, utilizing GTK+
for interfaces and Matchbox
for window management. The project provides an infrastructure for easy and powerful application development by providing core software such as shared libraries, database schemas, and building on available technology including SQLite
, D-BUS
, GStreamer
and several more common standards defined by freedesktop.org
.
One of the major goals of the GPE project is to encourage people to work on free software
for mobile devices and to experiment with new technologies.
Some of the applications already developed for GPE include:
GPE's PIM applications (GPE-Contacts, GPE-Calendar, GPE-ToDo) can be synchronized with their desktop and web counterparts (such as Novell Evolution
, Mozilla Sunbird
and Google Calendar
) through the use of GPE-Syncd and the OpenSync framework.
GPE also contains a number of GUI utilities for configuring 802.11 Wireless LAN
, Bluetooth
, IrDA
, Firewall
, ALSA, Package Management
, among others.
A mobile push e-mail
client based on the Tinymail
framework is in development.
GPE can be found as a primary environment in the following embedded Linux distributions:
Though it may not be as highly supported as the distributions listed above, GPE is also available through package management utilities in the following distributions:
. Freenode has placed the channel in trust, or locked, until both sides can come to an agreement. Subsequently, Linuxtogo.org currently uses #gpe-project, and Handhelds.org uses #handhelds-gpe, both on Freenode.net.
as of March 6, 2007. On June 25, 2007, the USPTO declined to accept a screenshot of the Handhelds.org GPE website as proof of Handhelds.org's ownership, and in addition requested a better specimen for a “GPE product”.
Handhelds.org, and OSI
board member Russ Nelson
, assert that the GPE project was given over to Handhelds.org for public development.
The GPE developers working at Linuxtogo.org maintain that they represent the active GPE project, and Handhelds.org was only a hosting provider. Furthermore, they point out that the GPE project existed before it was hosted on Handhelds.org.
The USPTO issued a final rejection regarding the GPE trademark on February 27, 2008. George France amended the application (removing references to GNU
and Linux). The GPE trademark was officially published for opposition June 3, 2008.
Despite George France's impending personal GPE trademark, the core GPE development team at Linuxtogo.org has abandoned much of the Handhelds.org GPE infrastructure. Linuxtogo.org developers have switched GPE to a new bootloader and replaced IPKG with OPKG, and made major changes to the GPE gui applications.
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
environment for handheld computers, such as palmtops and personal digital assistant
Personal digital assistant
A personal digital assistant , also known as a palmtop computer, or personal data assistant, is a mobile device that functions as a personal information manager. Current PDAs often have the ability to connect to the Internet...
s (PDAs), running the Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
operating system. GPE is a complete environment of software components and applications which makes it possible to use a Linux handheld for tasks such as personal information management
Personal information management
Personal information management refers to the practice and the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use information items such as documents , web pages and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks and fulfill a person’s various...
(PIM), audio playback, email, and web browsing.
Available under the terms of the GNU General Public License
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
and the GNU Lesser General Public License
GNU Lesser General Public License
The GNU Lesser General Public License or LGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation . It was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License or GPL and permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License...
, GPE is free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
.
Supported devices
GPE is bundled with embedded Linux distributionLinux distribution
A Linux distribution is a member of the family of Unix-like operating systems built on top of the Linux kernel. Such distributions are operating systems including a large collection of software applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, media players, and database applications...
s targeting the following platforms:
- Sharp ZaurusSharp ZaurusThe Sharp Zaurus is the name of a series of Personal Digital Assistant made by Sharp Corporation. The Zaurus was the most popular PDA during the 1990s in Japan and was based on a proprietary operating system. The first Sharp PDA to use the Linux operating system was the SL-5000D, running the...
- Hewlett-PackardHewlett-PackardHewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
iPAQIPAQiPAQ presently refers to a Pocket PC and personal digital assistant first unveiled by Compaq in April 2000; the name was borrowed from Compaq's earlier iPAQ Desktop Personal Computers. Since Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of Compaq, the product has been marketed by HP. The devices use a Windows... - Hewlett-Packard Jornada 72x
- Siemens AGSiemens AGSiemens AG is a German multinational conglomerate company headquartered in Munich, Germany. It is the largest Europe-based electronics and electrical engineering company....
SIMpadSIMpadThe SIMpad is a portable computer developed by the company Keith & Koep by order of Siemens AG, with an 8.4" TFT touchscreen. Commonly used with wireless network cards, it was marketed as a device to browse the World Wide Web...
SL4
In addition, GPE maintainers and the open source community are developing ports for additional devices:
- GamePark HoldingsGamePark HoldingsGPH, formerly known as GamePark Holdings, is a South Korean company responsible for creating the GP2X that was founded by former employees of the game maker GamePark in 2005.-History:...
GP2xGP2XThe GP2X is an open-source, Linux-based handheld video game console and portable media player developed by South Korean company GamePark Holdings. It was released on November 10, 2005, in South Korea only.... - Nokia 770Nokia 770 Internet TabletThe Nokia 770 Internet tablet is a wireless Internet appliance from Nokia, originally announced at the LinuxWorld Summit in New York City on May 25, 2005...
- Nokia N800Nokia N800The Nokia N800 Internet tablet is a wireless Internet appliance from Nokia, originally announced at the Las Vegas CES 2007 Summit in January 2007. N800 allows the user to browse the Internet and communicate using Wi-Fi networks or with mobile phone via Bluetooth. The N800 was developed as the...
- Palm TX
- PalmPalm, Inc.Palm, Inc., was a smartphone manufacturer headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, that was responsible for products such as the Pre and Pixi as well as the Treo and Centro smartphones. Previous product lines include the PalmPilot, Palm III, Palm V, Palm VII, Zire and Tungsten. While their older...
Treo 650Treo 650The Palm Treo 650 is a Palm OS based smartphone that was officially announced on October 24, 2004 as the successor to Palm's Treo 600. It began shipping in November 2004, but has since been discontinued...
http://www.grack.com/programming/misc/TreoLinux.html - HTC UniversalHTC UniversalThe HTC Universal is a Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC phone, manufactured by High Tech Computer Corporation. It was the first 3G/UMTS-enabled Pocket PC phone, and also the first to come with Windows Mobile 5.0 pre-installed....
- HTC TyphoonHTC TyphoonThe HTC Typhoon is a smartphone that runs the Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system. The phone is manufactured by Taiwanese HTC Corporation . At the time when the Typhoon was made, HTC was not in the business of selling devices to end-users...
- HTC Tornado
- HTC WizardHTC WizardThe HTC Wizard is an Internet-enabled Windows Mobile Pocket PC smartphone designed by High Tech Computer Corporation of Taiwan. It has a touchscreen with a left-side slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The Wizard's functions include those of a camera phone and a portable media player in addition to text...
- HTC ApacheHTC ApacheThe Pocket PC Apache is a Windows Mobile 5.0 device, sold as the PPC-6700 by Sprint, and the XV6700 by Verizon Wireless and various other US carriers. This device was one of the first CDMA Windows Mobile 5.0 devices on the market, and the first to be released in the United States...
http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/HTCApache
On February 5, 2007, The GPE project announced GPE Phone Edition, a new variant of GPE developed for mobile phones.
Development
X Window System
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
based GUI, utilizing GTK+
GTK+
GTK+ is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the X Window System, along with Qt.The name GTK+ originates from GTK;...
for interfaces and Matchbox
Matchbox (window manager)
Matchbox is a free and open source window manager for the X Window System. It is mainly intended for embedded systems and differs from most other window managers in that it only shows one window at a time...
for window management. The project provides an infrastructure for easy and powerful application development by providing core software such as shared libraries, database schemas, and building on available technology including SQLite
SQLite
SQLite is an ACID-compliant embedded relational database management system contained in a relatively small C programming library. The source code for SQLite is in the public domain and implements most of the SQL standard...
, D-BUS
D-Bus
In computing, D-Bus is a simple inter-process communication open-source system for software applications to communicate with one another. Heavily influenced by KDE2–3's DCOP system, D-Bus has replaced DCOP in the KDE 4 release. An implementation of D-Bus supports most POSIX operating...
, GStreamer
GStreamer
GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework written in the C programming language with the type system based on GObject.GStreamer allows a programmer to create a variety of media-handling components, including simple audio playback, audio and video playback, recording, streaming and editing...
and several more common standards defined by freedesktop.org
Freedesktop.org
freedesktop.org is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free software desktop environments for the X Window System on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It was founded by Havoc Pennington from Red Hat in March 2000.The organisation focuses on the user....
.
One of the major goals of the GPE project is to encourage people to work on free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
for mobile devices and to experiment with new technologies.
Some of the applications already developed for GPE include:
- GPE-Contacts - A contacts manager
- GPE-Calendar - The calendar application
- GPE-Edit - A simple text editor
- GPE-Filemanager - A file manager with MIME type and remote access support
- GPE-Gallery - Small and easy to use image viewer
- GPE-Games - A small collection of tiny games
- GPE-Mini-Browser - A CSSCSS-Computing:*Cascading Style Sheets, a language used to describe the style of document presentations in web development*Central Structure Store in the PHIGS 3D API*Closed source software, software that is not distributed with source code...
and JavascriptJavaScriptJavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
compatible compact web browser - GPE-Sketchbook - Create notes and sketches
- GPE-Soundbite - A voice memo tool
- GPE-ToDo - A task list manager
- GPE-Timesheet - Track time spend on tasks
- Starling - A GStreamer based audio player
- VLCVLC media playerVLC media player is a free and open source media player and multimedia framework written by the VideoLAN project.VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to...
- A media player
GPE's PIM applications (GPE-Contacts, GPE-Calendar, GPE-ToDo) can be synchronized with their desktop and web counterparts (such as Novell Evolution
Novell Evolution
Evolution or Novell Evolution is the official personal information manager and workgroup information management tool for GNOME. It combines e-mail, calendar, address book, and task list management functions. It has been an official part of GNOME since version 2.8 in September 2004...
, Mozilla Sunbird
Mozilla Sunbird
Mozilla Sunbird is a free and open source, cross-platform calendar application that was developed by the Mozilla Foundation, Sun Microsystems and many volunteers...
and Google Calendar
Google Calendar
Google Calendar is a free time-management web application offered by Google. It became available on April 13, 2006, and exited the beta stage in July 2009...
) through the use of GPE-Syncd and the OpenSync framework.
GPE also contains a number of GUI utilities for configuring 802.11 Wireless LAN
Wireless LAN
A wireless local area network links two or more devices using some wireless distribution method , and usually providing a connection through an access point to the wider internet. This gives users the mobility to move around within a local coverage area and still be connected to the network...
, Bluetooth
Bluetooth
Bluetooth is a proprietary open wireless technology standard for exchanging data over short distances from fixed and mobile devices, creating personal area networks with high levels of security...
, IrDA
IRDA
IRDA may refer to:* Infrared Data Association, in information and communications technology , a standard for communication between devices over short distances using infrared signals...
, Firewall
Firewall (computing)
A firewall is a device or set of devices designed to permit or deny network transmissions based upon a set of rules and is frequently used to protect networks from unauthorized access while permitting legitimate communications to pass....
, ALSA, Package Management
Ipkg
ipkg, or the Itsy Package Management System, is a lightweight package management system designed for embedded devices that resembled Debian's dpkg. It was used in the Unslung operating system for the Linksys NSLU2 , in OpenWrt, Openmoko, webOS, Gumstix, the iPAQ, QNAP NASes, Synology NASes and...
, among others.
A mobile push e-mail
Push e-mail
Push email is used to describe email systems that provide an always-on capability, in which new email is actively transferred as it arrives by the mail delivery agent to the mail user agent , also called the email client...
client based on the Tinymail
Tinymail
Tinymail is a software framework for developing lightweight applications with e-mail functionality. It is built on Evolution's Camel library.Released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, Tinymail is free software.-History:...
framework is in development.
Linux distributions
- ÅngströmÅngström distributionThe Ångström distribution is a Linux distribution for a variety of embedded devices. The distribution is the result of a unification of developers from the OpenZaurus, OpenEmbedded, and OpenSIMpad projects...
- Familiar LinuxFamiliar LinuxFamiliar Linux is a Linux distribution for iPAQ machines and other personal digital assistants , intended as a replacement for Windows CE on these machines. It can use OPIE or GPE Palmtop Environment as graphical user interface...
- OpenZaurusOpenZaurusOpenZaurus is a defunct embedded operating system for the Sharp Zaurus personal mobile tool PDA.- History :In its original form, the project was a repackaging of the SharpROM, the Zaurus's factory supplied kernel and root filesystem image...
Though it may not be as highly supported as the distributions listed above, GPE is also available through package management utilities in the following distributions:
- UbuntuUbuntu (operating system)Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...
- DebianDebianDebian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...
- Internet Tablet OS
Controversy
There are ongoing controversies surrounding the GPE project regarding a change of hosting service, ownership of an IRC channel, and a trademark dispute.Web hosting
Serious issues first began developing over a proposed change of hosting service. GPE had been hosted at Handhelds.org since April 2002. Some of GPE's developers suggested, and later followed through with, a move to Linuxtogo.org by October 2006. Handhelds.org responded by removing the user accounts of the departing developers, and any links or reference to the new GPE Linuxtogo.org location on the original GPE Handhelds.org site.IRC channel
Both parties claim ownership of the #gpe IRC channel located on freenodeFreenode
freenode, formerly known as Open Projects Network, is an IRC network used to discuss peer-directed projects. Their servers are all accessible from the domain name [irc://chat.freenode.net chat.freenode.net], which load balances connections by using the actual servers in rotation...
. Freenode has placed the channel in trust, or locked, until both sides can come to an agreement. Subsequently, Linuxtogo.org currently uses #gpe-project, and Handhelds.org uses #handhelds-gpe, both on Freenode.net.
Trademark
George France, a Handhelds.org administrator, has filed for trademark registration with the USPTO for GPE, in addition to OPIE and IpkgIpkg
ipkg, or the Itsy Package Management System, is a lightweight package management system designed for embedded devices that resembled Debian's dpkg. It was used in the Unslung operating system for the Linksys NSLU2 , in OpenWrt, Openmoko, webOS, Gumstix, the iPAQ, QNAP NASes, Synology NASes and...
as of March 6, 2007. On June 25, 2007, the USPTO declined to accept a screenshot of the Handhelds.org GPE website as proof of Handhelds.org's ownership, and in addition requested a better specimen for a “GPE product”.
Handhelds.org, and OSI
Open Source Initiative
The Open Source Initiative is an organization dedicated to promoting open source software.The organization was founded in February 1998, by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond, prompted by Netscape Communications Corporation publishing the source code for its flagship Netscape Communicator product...
board member Russ Nelson
Russ Nelson
Russell "Russ" Nelson is an American computer programmer. He was a founding board member of the Open Source Initiative and briefly served as its president in 2005.-Career:...
, assert that the GPE project was given over to Handhelds.org for public development.
The GPE developers working at Linuxtogo.org maintain that they represent the active GPE project, and Handhelds.org was only a hosting provider. Furthermore, they point out that the GPE project existed before it was hosted on Handhelds.org.
The USPTO issued a final rejection regarding the GPE trademark on February 27, 2008. George France amended the application (removing references to GNU
GNU
GNU is a Unix-like computer operating system developed by the GNU project, ultimately aiming to be a "complete Unix-compatible software system"...
and Linux). The GPE trademark was officially published for opposition June 3, 2008.
Despite George France's impending personal GPE trademark, the core GPE development team at Linuxtogo.org has abandoned much of the Handhelds.org GPE infrastructure. Linuxtogo.org developers have switched GPE to a new bootloader and replaced IPKG with OPKG, and made major changes to the GPE gui applications.
See also
- OPIE (operating system)
- Palm OSPalm OSPalm OS is a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants in 1996. Palm OS is designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is provided with a suite of basic applications for personal information management...
- Pocket PCPocket PCA Pocket PC is also known by Microsoft as a 'Windows Mobile Classic device'. It is a hardware specification for a handheld-sized computer, personal digital assistant , that runs the Microsoft 'Windows Mobile Classic' operating system...
- QtopiaQtopiaQt Extended is an application platform for embedded Linux-based mobile computing devices such as personal digital assistants, video projectors and mobile phones...
- Windows MobileWindows MobileWindows Mobile is a mobile operating system developed by Microsoft that was used in smartphones and Pocket PCs, but by 2011 was rarely supplied on new phones. The last version is "Windows Mobile 6.5.5"; it is superseded by Windows Phone, which does not run Windows Mobile software.Windows Mobile is...