Thanks to TI and the drawing they did at LinuxTag 2008 I got a BeagleBoard Rev. B4. When the package arrived I started getting the necessary serial cable.

This board is unbelievable small. You get in a small box together with a mini USB cable:

And now on to my favorite: The OMAP3 on the board runs at 500 MHz. As you see it is not dangerous to put a finger on the running CPU :-)

Some other CPU manufacturers should better work on being as efficient as this one instead of wasting money with delusive marketing campaigns.

Despite there are not many Beagleboards in the wild the community around it is quite active. Without doubt Koen Kooi is ahead of everyone else: He is fixing kernel, gcc and mplayer problems altogether. Thanks to this work, people will have it a lot easier when the board can finally be bought in shops.

Jalimo on the Beagleboard is currently blocked by libtool 2.2 and/or GNU Classpath issues. I have a workaround but am waiting for answers from the libtool developers about a real solution.

Yeah, its true. The OpenMoko gals & guys finally fixed manufacturing issues and the first free (as in Freedom) mobile phone hardware is produced as you read this sentence. Great isn't it?

Just in time for this I finished the first bit of work to get PhoneME Advanced compiled in OpenEmbedded. This means that soon no one wanting that runtime on their device needs to fumble with its intimidating build system. It will not be possible to provide recipes which allow setting all the countless configuration options but I will write the recipes in a way that you can easily derive the variant you want on your hardware.

If you look at the building instructions for PhoneME you will see that they contain a lot of annoying steps: Getting a GNU toolchain, patch some header files, set configuration options, point variables to a bunch of tools (javac, java, javah and so on). In contrast if you have a working OpenEmbedded environment all you need to do is enter:

bitbake phoneme-advanced-foundation

and this will not only give you that unhandy ZIP file the built produces. No, you get a package of any flavour (IPK, DEB and RPM) plus another one containing the unstripped 'cvm' executable. Sweet isn't it?

Here kind of a proof that I really got this working (on OpenMoko Freerunner):

root@om-gta02:~# java-cdc -version
Product: phoneME Advanced (phoneme_advanced_mr2-b73)
Profile: Foundation Profile Specification 1.1
JVM:     CVM phoneme_advanced_mr2-b73 (interpreter loop)

java-cdc -cp bsh.jar bsh.Interpreter
BeanShell 2.0b4 - by Pat Niemeyer (pat@pat.net)
bsh % print(System.getProperties());
{
java.library.builtin.net=yes,
sun.boot.library.path=/usr/lib/jvm/phoneme-advanced-foundation/lib,
java.vm.version=phoneme_advanced_mr2-b73,
java.vm.vendor=Sun Microsystems Inc.,
java.vendor.url=http://java.sun.com/,
path.separator=:,
java.vm.name=CVM,
file.encoding.pkg=sun.io,
java.vm.specification.name=Java Virtual Machine Specification,
user.dir=/home/root,
os.arch=armv4tl,
microedition.encoding=ISO-8859-1,
java.io.tmpdir=/tmp, line.separator=
,
java.vm.specification.vendor=Sun Microsystems Inc.,
microedition.profiles=,
java.awt.fonts=,
os.name=Linux,
java.library.builtin.zip=yes,
java.library.path=/usr/lib/jvm/phoneme-advanced-foundation/lib,
microedition.platform=j2me,
java.specification.name=Foundation Profile Specification,
java.class.version=47.0,
sun.misc.product=phoneME Advanced,
os.version=2.6.24,
user.home=/home/root,
user.timezone=,
file.encoding=ISO8859_1,
java.specification.version=1.1,
java.class.path=bsh.jar,
microedition.locale=en_US, user.name=root,
java.vm.specification.version=1.0,
java.home=/usr/lib/jvm/phoneme-advanced-foundation,
user.language=en,
java.specification.vendor=Sun Microsystems Inc.,
java.vm.info=interpreter loop,
java.version=phoneme_advanced_mr2-b73,
java.ext.dirs=,
sun.boot.class.path=/usr/lib/jvm/phoneme-advanced-foundation/lib/foundation.jar,
java.library.builtin.math=yes, microedition.commports=/dev/ttyS0,
java.vendor=Sun Microsystems Inc.,
file.separator=/,
microedition.configuration=CLDC-1.1,
sun.io.unicode.encoding=UnicodeLittle,
sun.cpu.endian=little,
user.region=US,
sun.cpu.isalist=
}

It is running interpreted only and with the most basic class library ("foundation" profile) but still it is a start.