Started in early 2002 GPE was one of the early Open Source projects that intended to make Linux-based mobile devices useful for everyone. At that time iPaq, SimPad and other devices developers ported Linux to were the target platforms for GPE. Initially the project was hosted at handhelds.org and using Subversion for revision control. This platform is history as well as linuxtogo.org which was used later. Currently this project has no website anymore but there is an IRC channel #gpe at Libera Chat.
GPE described itself like this on its project website: The GPE Palmtop Environment (GPE) is a collection of integrated software components optimized for (but not limited to) handheld and other input constrained and resource limited devices. GPE provides PIM (calendaring, todo management, contact management and note taking), Multimedia (audio playback and image viewing) and connectivity solutions (web browsing). Another major goal of GPE is to encourage people to work on free software for mobile devices and to experiment with new technologies.
GPE provides an infrastructure for easy and powerful application development by building on available technology including GTK+, SQLite, DBus and GStreamer and several more common standards defined by freedesktop.org.
GPE is committed to the Open Source idea. All GPE core components are released under GNU licenses, applications using the GPL and shared libraries using the LGPL. Those allow for the most free usability of the GPE system.
The GPE Palmtop Environment Git source code repository was created from the original Subversion (svn) repository. This originates from the latest linuxtogo.org backup:
UUID: d4735bf7-8e1f-0410-bce4-ef584eb11c25
Revision: 10145
Last Changed Author: fboor
Last Changed Rev: 10145
Last Changed Date: 2013-04-18 11:01:44 +0200 (Thu, 18 Apr 2013)
I've used a local SVN server and the following command to convert the repository:
svn2git --authors authors.txt svn://127.0.0.1/
The used authors mapping file authors.txt is part of the Git tree.
The main motivation is to keep the historic sources publicly available and maybe even useful for someone.
Florian Boor 2024/06/27