Posted by Jim Morris
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:20:08 GMT
Well I have had this thing for a few weeks now, and I have burned a lot
of hours playing with it :) (Wish I could bill someone for those
hours it would have paid for the phone 4 times over!)
I started with 2007.2 the built in image, and upgraded it initially
with dfu-util, then with opkg update && opkg upgrade.
I installed a bunch of things and tweaked it to death (literally).
I got Jalimo
java installed and working, and wrote the simple SWT app which worked nicely.
The only change to the instructions are you need to add
-force-depends to the opkg command.
As reported in my
other blog article
I got WIFI/WPA2 working, and finally got GPRS working.
I have not tried to pair with a bluetooth headset yet, although got
far enough to see that the device could be seen using the scan
command.
I played with all the varieties of on screen keyboards available, but
really couldn't use any of them as they are so small, and my eyes are
not that good anymore. I have seen some promising mentions of works in
progress for keyboards, but the ones in the Qtopia distribution are
the best, plus they have handwriting recognition which is a little
fussy but looks like it can be trained.
The GPS problems were fixed by an amazing community and OpenMoko
effort, which I have never seen before. There is a S/W fix, and a H/W
fix which I suspect most people will not be able to do, soldering
surface mount components is not for the faint of heart!
I spent several hours trying to build the OpenEmbedded and
the MokoMakefile development environments, so I could start to
contribute, but have still not been able to get them to finish
building the native toolchain needed to build any of the apps.
I get several errors, some of which I found workarounds to by googling
but eventually hit dead ends in both cases which I could not solve and
have not been reported or solved by the community. I am using a stock
KUbuntu 8.08 Hardy Heron desktop, which should be pretty mainstream,
so I don't know what is wrong. The pre built toolchain OpenMoko
provides for building apps does work however, but you can't build
soft keyboards, or system components that route (at least I couldn't
find a way to do it). I'll continue to hammer away at MokoMakefile and
see if I can eventually get it going, of course I'll post my findings
to the Wiki or dev mailing list if I succeed.
If someone could provide a VMPlayer image of a working OE or
Mokomakefile environment that would help a lot of us.
(Trolltech/Qtopia do provide exactly that for their development
tools).
So after several opkg upgrades and tweaks, I finally killed my highly
customized rootfs, X would no longer boot, sound was dead etc etc.
I tried to backup the image using
these instructions,
but always got an error halfway through, I suspect my flash image of
rootfs may have been corrupted. Anyway I lost all that work :(
I tried flashing ASU, but it seems too much a work in progress more so
than 2007.8.
Then I tried
Qtopia
now this is much more to my liking. The interface is clean, intuitive
and seems to work pretty well. There are still a few rough edges which
Trolltech seem to be taking care of, but it mostly works pretty well. The
on screen input methods (which there are several of) are very good,
even the keyboard has a nice touch where it zooms into the keys you
are touching. It also has the tiny tiny QWERTY keyboard if you prefer
that style and your eyes still work.
The downside is of course you lose access to all the applications
currently under development for the GTK based 2007.2, but Qtopia does
have a growing number of applications, and of course you can write
your own.
I am going to experiment a little with trying to run GTK based apps
under Qtopia, I know I can do that on my KDE (aka QT) desktop, so why
not under Qtopia? I'll update this if I get it to work.
UPDATE Oh ok the reason you can't do that is that Qtopia is not
running X Windows, so running GTK is not an option, bummer. I suppose you
could render GTK into a QT canvas or something but that is more work
than I am prepared to do at the moment.
The current show stoppers for me, which stops me being able to use
this a phone are...
- Nasty buzzing noise on both ends of the call
- Bluetooth pairing with a headset not easily available.
I'm sure people are working on these issues, and I wait patiently for
them to get fixed so I can dump my aging Motorola V600. I'd actually
try to pitch in myself but I can't get the development environment to
work!
Oh well guess I better get back to my paying job :)
Posted in Openmoko, Linux | Tags freerunner, openmoko | 4 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Jim Morris
Sun, 13 Jul 2008 11:32:03 GMT
I did my duty and upgraded from Gutsy to Hardy, after letting Hardy settle for a while.
For the most part it was painless (unlike the last upgrade to Gutsy!).
Unfortunately the sound was now broken I have a HDA-Intel AD198x Analog chip set.
Then I discovered (just when I needed it of course) that my Samsung
ML-2010 USB printer didn't print anymore.
I would get this weird error...
Unable to open device hal:///org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/...
After Googling I found this, he was
half right, I don't know why but it works, except that I needed to do...
sudo chmod 700 /usr/lib/cups/backend/usb
sudo chmod 700 /usr/lib/cups/backend/hal
sudo killall -HUP cupsd
sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys restart
ie both usb and hal.
That fixed it... Amazing!
Now why won't my audio work???
Ok now it does work, go figure. The only things I changed were added this to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
options snd-hda-intel model=3stack-dig
and made sure that Front was checked in the mixer and turned up.
Not sure which of those fixed it though.
Posted in Linux | Tags cups, hardy, ubuntu | 3 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Jim Morris
Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:53:11 GMT
OK so I just got my shiny new OpenMoko Freerunner GTA02.
This is an Open source GSM cell phone, running Linux and OpenMoko S/W stack.
This phone is really a developer release although it implies on the
website it is usable for the masses.
We will see...
Turning it on you see all this Linux boot up tiny tiny text scroll by,
ya the average Joe blo is going to love that ;)
So I followed the
startup guide
and plugged in the usb cable to my Ubuntu desktop. (If you don't have
Linux think again, maybe that $400's can go towards a tank of gas).
I followed the usb networking guide, and ssh'd into the phone, and
Holy Crap! it just worked!
First off it doesn't come with much, It can make a phone call, but no
other apps seem to be loaded.
Oh one gripe is there is nowhere to stow a stylus, it comes with a
huge pen/laser pointer/stylus, but who is going to keep that in their
pocket, and those with fat fingers are going to have a hard time doing
anything.
I actually had to RTFM to figure out how to close an application! BTW
this guide
seems to be pretty good. (You click the power button to close an app!
it really needs a close button somewhere where people expect one).
After loading most of the needed apps via the opkg app, which is slow
via USB 1.1 (whats up with that guys? its 2008! USB 2 is REQUIRED)
I found that most of them are pretty much unusable. The default
2007.2 UI is unintuitive, and most of the necessary apps simply don't
work well. Adding a contact is virtually impossible, try setting the
phone number to home instead of work for instance.
The web browser works but you can't input anything into forms, so
don't try logging into gmail.
The calendar makes no sense whatsoever.
OK so I am being harsh here, but the damn thing costs $400! and they
imply your average user could use it as a phone, so lets get over that
issue, and take it that this is a work in progress, very early stages,
and open source. It needs a good UI guide, come on we may not have a
super UI design guy, but copy the iphone or any other phone on the
market to get a clue how to make an intuitive UI. I am not a UI guy,
but even I can see this needs some work. BTW I do like the way the
scrolling works, that is very cool, you flick up or down and it
scrolls with some friction looks great, and works even better.
The platform itself has plenty of potential, built in GPS (which
doesn't work without an external antenna), accelerometers, which no one
has figured out how to use yet. A really nice VGA display, although
its invisible in bright sunlight, wifi which I was totally unable to
get to connect to a WPA/PSK station, and bluetooth, with no S/W support
for headsets.
Once all these issues are resolved I think it would make a great
primary handset.
I'll do my part and write something for it and release it as open
source, but I'm disappointed I can't use this as a phone yet.
I'll continue to RTFM if I can find one that describes the current UI
(the WIKI describes an obsolete UI). Maybe some of my issues are
simply not knowing how to use the UI, but that is a bad sign as I am a
developer and can use most UI's without RTFM'ing.
I still think this is a great (if expensive) toy for now, especially
for us Linux Geeks, and one day it may actually be a great phone too.
GPRS
UPDATE I got GPRS working, followed the instructions on the
WIKI, it is manual but it works.
My tmobile chatscript is...
# File: /etc/ppp/chatscripts/tmobile
TIMEOUT 20
ABORT BUSY
ABORT "NO ANSWER"
ABORT "NO DIALTONE"
ABORT VOICE
ABORT ERROR
ABORT RINGING
SAY 'Starting GPRS connect script\n'
"" +++
OK ATZ
OK ATE1
OK AT+CFUN=1
OK AT+COPS
SAY 'Setting APN\n'
OK AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","wap.voicestream.com"
ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
SAY 'Dialing...\n'
OK ATD*99***1#
CONNECT /n/d
and the script
# File: /etc/ppp/peers/tmobile
#
/dev/ttySAC0
115200
crtscts
lock
hide-password
defaultroute # set the default route
usepeerdns
holdoff 3
ipcp-accept-local
lcp-echo-failure 12
lcp-echo-interval 3
noauth
noipdefault
novj
novjccomp
replacedefaultroute
persist
debug
connect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/chatscripts/tmobile"
disconnect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/chatscripts/tmobile-disconnect"
and a script to run it all...
/etc/init.d/gsmd stop
echo "1" > /sys/bus/platform/devices/neo1973-pm-gsm.0/power_on
chown uucp.uucp /dev/ttySAC0
stty -F /dev/ttySAC0 crtscts
pppd call tmobile
GPS
I did get a fix with the GPS using the internal antenna, however it
takes some concerted effort, see this page
for hints. NOTE without the sd card I get a fix within 1 minute.
WIFI
UPDATE Got WIFI and WPA/PSK working, again there are two sets of
instructions on the WIKI, the first set doesn't work for me, however
the second set does... adding
iface eth0 inet dhcp
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
to /etc/network/interfaces and then do ifdown usb0 and ifup eth0 of
course you need to setup /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
appropriately. However when I ssh into the phone via the wifi after
disconnecting the USB, it looses its connection regularly and usually
within a few minutes. Not sure why that is, my WIFI is generally very
stable with my laptop. I wonder if the bluetooth is interfering with
it?
Finally I would like to say that I love the idea of an open spurce
cell phone. I can see that these issues will probably get fixed pretty
quickly as it is open source and there are thousands of eyes on the
code, and if there is something you don't like you can fix it. Lets
see you do that on your I-Phone ;)
Posted in Openmoko, Linux | Tags freerunner, openmoko | 19 comments | no trackbacks
