Two weeks ago, I took part in RMLL as advertised on the Replicant blog shortly before the event. This year again, it was a really nice event to be a part of. Lots of people showed interest for Replicant and some even came specifically to see my talks about the project: what a pleasant surprise! The videos of my talks are already available on the RMLL website and they were also added to the Conferences page of the Replicant wiki.

Back from the event, the development effort was focused on cleaning up the bits and pieces laying around for Optimus Black support in U-Boot, now that the merge window is open. A patch series was sent for review earlier today and despite being incomplete as of now, it will serve as a solid base for future additions. Some more work is indeed required to have all the necessary features supported, but those patches will be written in a non-upstreamable way for Replicant at first. The current status of those dirty patches allows booting CyanogenMod without too much trouble, except for the occasional random reboot and other oddities that still have to be sorted out before it can seriously be used for daily use.

Thus, with basic bootloader support out of the way, it’s time to start the Replicant port to the device. Communication with the modem will require some heavy work on Hayes-RIL, our implementation of the AT protocol radio interface layer, that is supposed to be more modern and robust than other implementations. Other fundamental parts required to have Replicant running with sufficient features to make the device useful should be less trouble.

In a month or so, the Chaos Communication Camp will take place in Germany, organized by the almost mythical Chaos Computer Club. Replicant is going to take part in the event, hopefully with a lightning talk and/or less formal self-organized events. The camp will be a great occasion to chat a bit about the current state of the art of software freedom on mobile devices, and more! Various other interesting projects will be there as well: members of the Neo900 project will hold the Neo village, where I’ll be likely to be found. As usual, I’ll also be available to verify the Replicant release key fingerprint, help newcomers install Replicant on their device and basically anything else that I can help with!

As mentioned a few months ago, Gitorious is closing down and even though the Replicant project page can still be reached there, cloning the repositories has been broken for some time. After thoroughly evaluating all the hosting possibilities for Replicant (thanks to the many suggestions from the community!), we have finally reached a decision. We didn’t want to be affiliated with a hosting provider that doesn’t match Replicant’s core values, that are all about software freedom. In addition, it seemed better not to be hosted by a third party, to ensure the security of the source code. These criteria left us with very little choice available, but thankfully, we were able to comply with them, as the Replicant source code is now hosted by the Free Software Foundaton, at git.replicant.us!

We are very thankful to the FSF for providing us with that solution and the hardware required for our needs (the Replicant source code is very large). Eventually, we will move all the Replicant source there, as opposed to only the parts of CyanogenMod and AOSP that we modified, so that we don’t have to rely on any third party at all.

With all those discussions going on, I almost forgot to mention that I will be taking part in RMLL/LSM again this summer. The event takes place in Beauvais, France (near Paris) from July 6th to 10th (sorry for the short notice). I will be presenting two talks there, one about the overall state of the Replicant project, in French, and one about liberating mobile devices from the ground up, in English. In addition, I will be taking part in a workshop on free embedded devices in room 219, were I will show a few embedded devices running free software.

As usual, everyone is welcome to come, say hi and have a nice chat. It’s also possible to verify the Replicant release GPG key in person to trust the verification of our images releases. And of course, I’ll be available to help install Replicant on supported devices!