If you do a search on Google for “linux phone” the results will be quite disappointing, composed of a few older projects that have nothing to do with a mobile phone and some news articles mainly about the Motorola Linux phone. No specific open-source project, no documentation, no book.

But with the momentum that Linux is getting in the mobile phone industry, I believe there is something to do here by creating the “Linux phone portal”. It would gather all news and announcements related to the Linux in the mobile phone industry. It would also feature original content, some of it business oriented, some more technical. Legal and security aspects would also be covered.

This is something to do now, before someone else steps in, to become the reference on the subject. Phones are a particular type of embedded devices and a specific portal could have its place next to LinuxDevices.com.

The highlight of the site would probably be the technical documentation. It would be in the form of a collection of online articles. The site could be organized as following:

- A news section.

- An article section, technical and others.

- A link section.

- A product section, which lists the available Linux phones (could come in a second step, as there aren’t really any Linux phones yet on the market, except the Motorola one).

Updating the site regularly would be the main challenge. Hopefully, it the site is successful, other people would contribute with articles. There is also a need for making publicity for it, for example in related blogs, in Slashdot comments, etc. Having it show up first on Google on a “linux phone” search should be a middle-term goal. Some money could be made with Google ads.

A domain name is required. Something like linux-phones.org would be fine. There is actually already a linuxphones.com, but it doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2003.

Which tools to use is another question. Use of CSS is obvious. But there are some many CMS (content management system) and blog software, none really fitting it seems. The choice of the ISP is very important if the tool is server based, like most are, because some ISPs don’t support Perl, or only provide PHP running in safe-mode. A client-side application wouldn’t have this kind of problem, but there aren’t many of them. CityDesk seems nice, but it seems more interesting to do a collaborative journal, and there are some limitations, like no comments system.

As we can see, it’s not an easy task, and it would be easier to be two. Anybody interested in trying?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2004 at 4:59 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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