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 | no comments | no trackbacks
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 | no comments | no trackbacks
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 | no 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
