Linux Solutions

Earlier this week he GNOME desktop team officially released GNOME version 2.24, which incorporates a number of bug fixes and some funky new features, including the first release of the GNOME Mobile Platform.

The GNOME Mobile Platform will be of interest to budding developers, and the GNOME team is getting ready to make virtual machine images of various mobile platforms available for improving testing.

GNOME’s Mobile Platform is integrated with a number of mobile devices, including Maemo, Ubuntu Mobile, Moblin, and Poky Linux. The devices powered by the platform range from mobile phones to netbooks to interlocking DIY Bug Labs components.

Programmers should be comfortable with the infrastructure, libraries and toolkits used in development, but there are some device specific components, such as Matchbox, that new developer’s to mobile many have not come across yet.

Although the GNOME Mobile Platform’s libraries are natively written in C, bindings from other programming languages (C++ and Python) are available and should open up the platform to a wider range of developers.

GNOME’s Mobile site details the projects missions, as well as a number if technologies and apps that the project would like to see developed, for eventual integration in to the mobile platform.

New developers are encouraged to take part by the team, and begin tyo get themselves acquainted with the community.