Getting a Simputer

Today I've been paying a short visit to Geodesic Information System Ltd. Bangalore Group (formerly PicoPeta Software), one of the two companies behind the Indian Simputer project.

Now most of the readers of this blog will probably think "oh, that computer for poor Indians", which is just not true, but the result of both media (and some government officials) misrepresenting the idea of this project.

Anyway, they'll give me one of their high-end Amida models to hack a bit on them. I guess one of the first thing I'll want to do is to create an OpenEmbedded machine description and kernel package for it, in order to be able to use all the available OE packages on it.

This is _not at all_ to say that I dislike the software that is pre-installed in the device (which provides a top-of-world-class and extremely unique user interface). But it's extremely useful to be able to choose between the pre-installed software and existing software packaged in OpenEmbedded. Maybe some of the existing GPL (or otherwise free licensed) Simputer software can be packaged as OE ipk packages and then be seamlessly integrated.