FamiliarDistribution

Familiar Linux Distribution

About Familiar

The Familiar Project is composed of a group of loosely knit developers all contributing to creating the next generation of handheld device operating system. Currently, most of our development time is being put towards producing a stable and full featured Linux distribution for the HP iPAQ series and other personal digital assistants (PDAs), as well as applications to run on top of the distribution.

Features

The Familiar Linux distribution has the following key features:

Choice of user environments, both with a full personal information management (PIM) suite and other applications

GPE
Opie

Full application / package support based on ipkg
Many system programs are implemented using BusyBox, saving much space
Dropbear SSH server included by default
Supports commonly used NetworkingConnections, such as SSH, PPP, IPsec, MIPv6 and more
Built entirely using the OpenEmbedded build system

Supported Handhelds

See SupportedHandheldSummary for which handheld devices are supported.

News

2006-08-20 -- Familiar v0.8.4 released
2005-04-13 -- Familiar v0.8.2 released
2005-02-25 -- Familiar v0.8.1 released
2004-12-23 -- Familiar v0.8.0 released
2003-11-13 -- Familiar v0.7.2 released

See FamiliarChangeLog for a list of changes in each release.

Screenshots

Opie

Opie screenshots (gallery)
OpieScreenshots (wiki)

GPE

More GPE screenshots...

Installation

Please read FamiliarReleaseNotes for known issues and workarounds.

Familiar 0.8.4 installation guide.

The wiki Installation Guide is in development, and is available Here

Older releases can be found here: http://familiar.handhelds.org/releases/

The current release versions are:

Familiar v0.8.4

supports iPAQ h3600, h3700, h3800, h3900, h5400, and h5500 series and Siemens Simpad
initial support for the HP iPAQ h2200, hx4700, and h6300 series

Familiar v0.7.2 for the iPAQ h3100 series

Support

If you have problems, please first check that your issue is not covered in FamiliarReleaseNotes or FamiliarFaq.

Mailing List

Feel free to join the Familiar Distribution mailing list. An up-to-date archive of this list can be found here or here.

IRC

Most of the Familiar developers spend quite a bit of time on IRC. Feel free to hop on irc.freenode.net and join #familiar. While you're at it, join #handhelds.org as well.

Bug Tracking

Please report bugs in the base Familiar system (console tools, packaging, missing files, networking, errors on boot etc.) using the handhelds.org Bugzilla. Opie, GPE and OpenEmbedded all have their own bug tracking systems:

Opie
GPE. Or try here

Future

Next release

Roadmap

2007 -- Familiar v0.9

bug fixing

See FamiliarRoadMap for medium and long term goals.

People

Here are just some of the people involved in the Familiar Project:

Jamey Hicks - Kernel Sanders and All-around Godlike being. jamey@handhelds.org. IRC nick: jamey
Phil Blundell - GPE improverer. pb@handhelds.org. IRC nick: pb_
George France . france@handhelds.org. IRC nick: france
Russ Nelson nelson@crynwr.com. IRC nick: nelson
Rene Wagner rw@handhelds.org. IRC nick: reenoo
Erik Hovland erik@handhelds.org. IRC nick: uE

Alumni

Koen Kooi koen@handhelds.org. IRC nick: koen
Carl Worth cworth@handhelds.org. IRC nick: cworth
Ken Causey nikos@handhelds.org. IRC nick: nikos
Jim Gettys jg@pa.dec.com. IRC nick: jg

Handhelds.org - Open source for handheld devices