(用电脑上的摄像头拍的，还在激动中…)

06 Feb 2012 8:30am GMT

After having skipped FOSDEM in 2011, I wanted to go this year, especially because of the Golden Delicious stand where we had the OpenPhoenux GTA04 on show. A lot of people came around and were excited that someone picked up where Openmoko had left in 2009. The GTA04 is the true successor of the FreeRunner and I strongly invite all of you to support this movement by buying one. You will not get a more open mobile phone anywhere else.

I know that Brussels is always a bit colder than Frankfurt, so I tend to carry appropriate clothing… what I didn't expect though was that it was frickin' -20 on saturday. I have never been freezing more in my life. Lets cross fingers that I won't come back home with a cold. Especially due to the crazy public transportation situation. The Deutsche Bahn managed to accumulate a one hour delay on my way to Brussels - that's ok, however they managed to crash the engine in Aachen on my way back. So badly that we had to switch to a regional train and switch again in Cologne. Man… *sigh*

On to some good news… another thing I didn't expect was kind of an Openmoko family reunion. It was amazing to find Jan Lübbe, Stefan Schmidt, Daniel Willmann, Harald Welte, and even Rasterman hanging around at FOSDEM. That was just great. I also happened to share my hotelroom with Boudewijn which was unexpected but again very cool.

So despite the freezing, it was a great FOSDEM for me and I'm looking forward to go again next year, perhaps bringing Sabine and Lara Marie as well.

05 Feb 2012 6:08pm GMT

GTA04 Installation Guide for SHR

This is a step-by-step guide, which should get you from zero to a working SHR on your GTA04 in just a few minutes.

Getting the files

• shr-core image:
  • shr-image-om-gta04.tar.gz
  • shr-image-om-gta04.tar.gz (latest staging image, for testers only)
• 1st stage bootloader:
  • MLO
• 2nd stage bootloader:
  • u-boot.bin
• SHR u-boot bootscript:
  • boot.scr (this bootscript will enable kernel updates via opkg, contrary to the GTA04 hw-tester bootscript)

Preparing the microSD card

Your microSD card needs to have 2 partitions. One for the bootloader and one for the rootfs and the kernel:

• 1st partition: FAT32, "boot"
• 2nd partition: ext3, "rootfs"

Furthermore, it needs to be formatted with: 255 heads, 63 sectors/track.
To get this right, you can easily use this script: omap3-mkcard.sh

sudo ./omap3-mkcard.sh /dev/mmcblk0

Installing the bootloader

To install the bootloader, you have to copy the 1st stage bootloader (MLO), 2nd stage bootloader (u-boot.bin) and the bootscript (boot.scr) to the "boot"-partition.

It is important to copy the 1st stage bootloader (MLO) to the microSD card as the very first file.

cp MLO /media/boot/MLO
cp u-boot.bin /media/boot/u-boot.bin
cp boot.scr /media/boot/boot.scr

Installing SHR

To install the SHR image, you have to untar the image you downloaded to the "rootfs"-partition.

tar xzvpf shr-image.tar.gz --numeric-owner -C /media/rootfs

First boot

After you cleanly unmounted the 2 partitions and put the microSD card back into the GTA04 you can boot SHR.

A first start wizard will pop up, which let's you choose between some options.
Be aware to choose a scale factor of 2.0 when asked. Other than this you could just keep the defaults.

Installing Firmware

If you want to use the WiFi/Bluetooth chip, you have to use a non-free firmware from Marvell.
To get it you have to install linux-firmware-sd8686.

opkg install linux-firmware-sd8686

Congratulations

You successfully installed SHR on your GTA04.
For further information or if you have any issues, please consult the SHR wiki.

02 Feb 2012 2:05pm GMT

I've been having intermittent problems with sound not working. Usually restarting (ie, killing) PulseAudio has done the trick but today it was even worse; the sound hardware mysteriously vanished from the Sound Settings capplet. Bog knows what's up with that, but buried in "Sound Troubleshooting" I found "Getting ALSA to work after suspend / hibernate" which contains this nugget:

The alsa "force-reload" command will kill all running programs using the sound driver so the driver itself is able to be restarted.

Huh. Didn't know about that one. But seems reasonable, and sure enough,

$ /sbin/alsa force-reload

did the trick.

That wiki page goes on to detail adding a script to /etc/pm/sleep.d to carry this out after every resume. That seems excessive; I know that sometimes drivers don't work or hardware doesn't reset after the computer has been suspended or hibernated, but in my case the behaviour is only intermittent, and seems related to having docked (or not), having used an external USB headphone (or not), and having played something with Flash (which seems to circumvent PulseAudio. Bad). Anyway, one certainly doesn't want to kill all one's audio-using programs just because you suspended! But as a workaround for whatever it is that's wrong today, nice.

AfC

30 Jan 2012 7:10am GMT

Jolly has been hacking up a nice new RSSI monitoring firmware application for OsmocomBB.

I let the pictures speak for themselves:

I really hope this trend continues and we'll get some actual user interface in OsmocomBB at some point this year..

28 Jan 2012 1:00am GMT

Some days ago, I noticed that the famous OP25 project (a Free Software implementation of the APCO25 system, a digital trunked radio system) was no longer reachable on-line. It seems they were running this on a desktop PC in a university. As nobody in the project still seems to be at that university, a change in the network configuration had accidentally rendered the website unreachable.

After some quick e-mails, I offered to host them within the osmocom.org family of Free Software Projects for mobile communications. This is when op25.osmocom.org was created, and a full-site backup uploaded + installed.

I'm really happy that we were able to do a small part to help to make sure this valuable project remains accessible to interested parties in the signal processing and mobile communications field.

25 Jan 2012 1:00am GMT

I just came home from my christmas holidays and found a nice, little parcel from Shapeways in my mail box. It contained my first experiment with the Blender 3D software and the Shapeways 3D printing service.

The Story

A few weeks earlier I started to work on the original Openmoko Neo 1973 (GTA01) CAD files, as found at goldelico.com, with the intention of creating a 3D printable model, which I could print and use as a case for my new Goldelico GTA04 smartphone. To get started I got a Blender 3D crash course by a friend of mine.

First Attempt

As I never did any 3D work before I started with the easiest part - the battery cover:

This first prototype was printed using the "White Strong & Flexible" material offered by Shapeways. As you can see on the pictures, this material is a little rough, but still feels nice in the hands. Furthermore I removed the hole at the bottom, as it was pretty hard to design.

The printed part fits nicely on my existing Openmoko Neo Freerunner (GTA02) case, which contains my GTA04 board at the moment:

Future Plans

Now, that my first attempt was pretty successful, I plan to further work on this topic, to acquire a full case for my GTA04, so I can use the old case for my beloved Openmoko Neo Freerunner (GTA02) again.
As a next step I'll modify the Neo 1973′s middle and front parts to be printable with a 3D printer and I'll probably try to print them using a less rough material, to compare the results.

How you can help

If you like this effort, I'd be happy if you'd go to my Shapeways site ("SlyParts") and order the first part of your GTA04 case, which will raise 1€ for myself, which I'll use to order further prototypes.

If you don't have a Goldelico GTA04, yet, you should take a look at the GTA04 Group Buy Tour, where we collect a batch of 350 orders which will be produced at once, so the price can get squeezed down.

If you ordered a part at my Shapeways site, please leave a comment here about which material you used and how it feels.

02 Jan 2012 6:38pm GMT

There is a successor for the Free Software phone that OpenMoko Freerunner was. While the Freerunner was officially called GTA02, this new successor is called GTA04 and there is a group buy effort going on.

I know the price isn't very cheap, but we aren't a big company able to order in bulk hundreds of thousands of devices, if not millions, so 449 € + shipping for the first batch if we get 400 buyers will help get this phone into the hands of some Free Software developers.

Some reasons to buy one of these (the tricky part is having a Freerunner case if you want to use it as a phone):

1. you are a programmer, you have some money set aside and you want to help develop a Free Software anti-vendor stack like http://wiki.freesmartphone.org/index.php/Main_Page
2. you are not a programmer, but you can contribute with other important stuff like testing, designing, and have the money to buy a device into which you'd be able to test your stuff
3. you only want to use a Free Software phone, and as such will have a lot of tolerance towards the inevitable bugs of new emerging platforms that don't have millions of Euros to hire full time programmers, designers, etc.
4. you have some money and would like to give that phone as charity to one of the above
5. you are an angel with a lot of money, and would like to offer the first batch to the amount of registered buyers (under 400)

I would fit somewhere between 1 and 2 except I can't afford 449 € on this, so I'm kind of hoping for someone circa number 5…

01 Jan 2012 1:55pm GMT

My apologies for not sharing any books these past few months. I've been reading on a Kindle. And Amazon, it seems, doesn't agree that second hand books are worth handing down to the digital age.

There is a tip I'd like to share. Something that has worked very well for me is to identify a writer I love. Read everything they have written. Read what they read. And continue ad infinitum.

For the last five years I've pretty much exclusively read fiction. Dostoyevsky to Kafta to Kundera to Cervantas and now Vargas Llosa. But I could not resist reading Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs (I highly recommend it!).

Since then I continued with Einstein. And currently Benjamin Franklin. But back to the first two…

Einstein and Jobs are connected in more ways than dying and being born (respectively) in the same year. I've wanted to write about my favorite connection for some time. Since today is the last day of 2011, it probably explains my sense of urgency.

I remember watching Jonathan Ive's speech at "Celebrating Steve" and being moved to tears by what he said:

Now while hopefully the work appeared inevitable. Appeared simple, and easy, it really cost. It cost us all, didn't it?

But you know what? It cost him most. He cared the most. He worried the most deeply. He constantly questioned, 'Is this good enough? Is this right?'

And despite all his successes, all his achievements, he never presumed, he never assumed, that we would get there in the end. And when the ideas didn't come, and when the prototypes failed, it was with great intent, with faith, he decided to believe we would eventually make something great.

But it wasn't until Einstein's biography that I started thinking about caring in the large scope of life. Physicist Lee Smolin described Einstein as, "a gardener weeding a flower bed." He wrote:

I believe what allowed Einstein to achieve so much was primarily a moral quality. He simply cared far more than most of his colleagues that the laws of physics have to explain everything in nature coherently and consistently.

Care about what you do. Sweat the small stuff. Charles Eames once said, "The details are not the details. They are the product". I believe this to my core. My New Year's Resolution is simple: To care even more.

Happy New Year!

31 Dec 2011 5:40pm GMT

Juste un petit message pour souhaiter à tous une excellente année 2012 !

J'en profite pour signaler l'excellent article de l'ami Trim sur linuxfr.org.

Vous y apprendrez que le projet GTA04 "Phoenux" a atteint la phase de commercialisation grand public ainsi que les nombreuses améliorations par rapport au Neo Freerunner (GTA02).

Mais l'article est très complet, je vous laisse le découvrir.
Bonne lecture et bonne fête

31 Dec 2011 2:43pm GMT

Update 9.1.2012: results are updated.

As the year 2011 nears it's end, we - the Openmoko Community - did a poll [0] about which is the most popular hardware and which is the most popular software in our community. The poll was open for one week now and we got votes from 73 people.

I decided to close the poll now and release the results to the public. To create a ranking I gave 1 point to a "YES" vote and 0.5 points to a "(YES)" vote. The maximum (100%) is 73 points.

Rankings

Software Side:

1. SHR                  112.5 points    (61%)
2. QtMoko                99.5 points    (54%)
3. Debian                75.5 points    (41%)
4. Other Distro          40.0 points    (22%)

Hardware Side:

1. Om GTA02             158.5 points    (86%)
2. Goldelico GTA04       71.0 points    (38%)
3. Nokia N900            34.0 points    (18%)
4. Other Device          26.0 points    (14%)
5. Palm Pre (+variants)  14.5 points    ( 8%)
6. Om GTA01               9.5 points    ( 5%)
7. Google Nexus S         7.0 points    ( 4%)

Conclusion

On the software side SHR is still the most popular distro, directly followed by QtMoko. Quiet a few people commented, that they intend to code their own software/GUI mostly to educated themselves.

On the hardware side the Om GTA02 is the clear winner (which was expected). Surprisingly the Goldelico GTA04 is the 2nd most interesting device in this community, even though very few people have one, yet. Still, most of the developers already own one and you should get yours soon [1], as it seems to become a common target of this community. The Palm Pre, Om GTA01 and Google Nexus S got very few points and thus are probably not worth to support…

Happy New Year

Now, i'd like to wish all you Open Hard- and Software-Enthusiasts out there a good start into the year 2012. I hope the GTA04 project will flourish in 2012 and will help our community to grow and free the phone again!

Links

[0] http://www.doodle.com/sh6insnivnvqyz7h
[1] http://www.handheld-linux.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04 Group Tour

27 Dec 2011 2:48pm GMT

15 days mining about Total: 4.04000000 BTC， the mining software restart about 850 times.

24 Dec 2011 8:29am GMT

'Yuenshu Fong' create a Linux version usbboot for xburst 4770 cpu. you can find the source tar ball here

24 Dec 2011 8:23am GMT

This is insane. I'm sitting at a café in Sydney using their hotspot. Went to search for something, and I kept getting strange looking "site not found" pages. Huh? Thy were working a few hours ago. So I started digging.

The café's upstream ISP is "Optus", one of the major Australian carriers. To my astonishment I found that Optus's DNS servers are interfering with Google searches, stealing their DNS lookups and serving results pages on their own (shitty quality) branded search instead! Try https:? No connection; and Google+ wouldn't load either.

Obviously as soon as realized what's going on I immediately changed DNS servers to something reliable. Before I did I found a tiny "about this page" link at the bottom of the heinous Optus search results page, where I was told how great this was for me, but how I could opt out of their "default" search engine if I wanted to but was warned this was an "advanced setting".

Seriously, what do Optus think they're doing? From a commercial standpoint, do they really think that their captive audience matters to anyone advertising on the web? Of course not, but in the mean time they're certainly going to alienate customers who just maybe actually do want to use (in this case) Google sites.

There's a bigger issue, though. Unaltered answers to DNS queries is a backbone of net neutrality. That's our problem, but once carriers start poisoning nameservers in their own favour it will be but a blink before everyone is doing it to each other and lookups will become worthless. While I'm sure the morons in Marketing who thought that sabotaging DNS queries would be a good idea won't be worried about the wreckage that will cause for everyone else, such a war wouldn't be good for any of the companies involved, either. And meanwhile, if they really want everyone to learn how to install an app to "fix" the internet…

Of course, this is only a taste of what we'll be in for when the communications minister finally gets his compulsory Great Firewall of Australia censorship in place, but one thing at a time. If you're looking for internet access down here, clearly Optus or anything that uses their network should be blacklisted.

AfC

20 Dec 2011 4:00am GMT

Google Maps is now mapping the indoors. I saw an ad for this while passing through MSP yesterday (given how much time I spend on the Internet, it's strange and a little embarrassing to learn about new things on the Internet from airport billboards), since one of their initial targets is the infamous Mall of America.

Detailed floor plans automatically appear when you're viewing the map and zoomed in on a building where indoor map data is available. The familiar "blue dot" icon indicates your location within several meters, and when you move up or down a level in a building with multiple floors, the interface will automatically update to display which floor you're on. All this is achieved by using an approach similar to that of 'My Location' for outdoor spaces, but fine tuned for indoors.

Thoughts about this:

• Okay, having a map of Ikea or an airport on my phone might be kind of nice.
• Shouldn't they have launched this years ago when people still went to malls?
• Shouldn't they have launched this at least earlier in the year, in time for people to know about it and have it before the one time each year when people who don't go to malls still maybe go to the mall?
• How does it know where you are, when cell and GPS so often don't work in these places? "fine tuned for indoors" is a very mysterious phrase. Based on nearby access points?
• Is your location also being transmitted if you use this service? In other words, will Google now know which stores you shop at, how many times you use the restroom, and whether you were actually shopping for gifts for other people?
• Relatedly, will this be free software? Or will it rely on proprietaryness in order to do things users would prefer it didn't do? (Answer: It's proprietary software, part of the existing proprietary Google Maps mobile application.)
• Will they sell data to the stores and malls?
• Will they start indicating various promotions on the maps?
• Will these promotions be targeted based on your past meandering behavior?
• Are they mapping less-commercial spaces, like museums?
• Are they making the map data available for others to use? Especially for truly public spaces?
• How do we get the functional part of this into OpenStreetMap?
• Is Google secretly working on computer-piloted mobility scooters?
• Where am I?

Title from John Ashbery

19 Dec 2011 5:29pm GMT

Information Technology has seen a really crazy year. Among all the smaller incidents, the big bangs involved Nokia partnering with Microsoft, abandoning Maemo, HP driving with WebOS against the wall, patent lawsuits everywhere.

What that means for FOSS-lovers is clear… you can't trust any company to continue working on anything. Business demands are what counts in the world of mass markets. If you want longterm support for a platform, your best bet is to build a community around it. But you will also want to work on hardware support otherwise you'll run into the next dead end.

To be honest, right now I don't see much of a future for any mobile Linux-inspired platform other than the mutation called Android. But that's not much of a problem per se. The smartphone market is crazy. To compete in that world, you have to give up on freedom. But is the mass market really what we want? Is it what mobile Linux needs?

I don't think so. There are still huge opportunities for using Linux-based mobile software platforms in niches such as machine2machine communication, home automation, research, teaching, and more. That's where a service-based middleware like FSO comes into the game: for special interests. However, even niche-adoption is hindered without a minimal set of applications. And that is where we still lack: Even special interest people want to use their smartphones to manage contacts, browse the web, send mails, play media, etc. We don't have an integrated software stack with a complete set of UI applications that would cover these needs. Openmoko worked on one, but failed. Nokia worked on multiple ones, but gave up (multiple times). What else do we have?

With HP's recent announcement about releasing WebOS as open source, the game may have changed. If we could use the WebOS application stack on top of the FSO middleware, we may have a real chance to get something great and usable - and complete - soon. I have always liked the WebOS UI. If it's a bit slower than other UIs, who cares as long as it is free?

13 Dec 2011 7:55am GMT