Symbian Blog

The Kernel Taster Kit published on Wednesday 21st October has been downloaded by over 550 people in the last 9 days – 77 to the US, 66 to Russia, 42 to China and lots of other countries besides.

This is a great response – we were wondering about blogging that we’d reached 100 downloads, and 500+ was a real surprise. It has made me realise that we missed a few tricks with the kit and the documentation: we forgot to tell you how to get updates, and we forgot to tell you how you can contribute back (What were we thinking…?).

Time to fix that right now.

Get Connected…

The kit contained a snapshot of the source tree. There have been updates to the qemu package since then: Johnathan White at Accenture has added a sound driver and other good things which he demonstrated in the Hands-On Lab session at SEE – thanks, John!

To connect your copy of the source code to the Open Source Mercurial repositories on developer.symbian.org, you will need to install Mercurial, clone each of the three repositories directly into the source tree, and then you are all set to pull down future updates, save your changes, share changes with others and …

…Get Contributing!

As you explore with the code and make changes, you might find bugs: you might also find things which you think could be done better. Please help the Symbian community by raising these things in our Bugzilla database, which tracks both defects & enhancements. Better still, you could develop the necessary code changes to fix the problem, and offer them back as contributions by publishing them to the Mercurial repository.

If you haven’t previously seen the Symbian^3 product reference on the developer website, now’s a good time to visit to find guides to base porting and device drivers, among others, as well as API reference documentation. And don’t forget that the Symbian OS Internals book is available on our Wiki, if you want some introduction to the code, and our Forums are a good place to ask questions.

Thanks to everyone who has downloaded the kit so far – I’m thrilled that there is so much interest in this very technical “Under the Hood” part of the Symbian Platform.

William Roberts

PS. Our logs show that some of you click on the download links several times – please get in touch if you are having any difficulties downloading from our website.