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The replacement board for the Openmoko Neo Freerunner and Neo 1973 – called Goldelico GTA04 alias “Phoenux” – just arrived at it’s final production stage after another slight delay.
Goldelico GTA04
The Goldelico GTA04[1] is a state of the art hardware upgrade for your Openmoko Neo Freerunners and Neo 1973s. It has an ARM Cortex A8 800MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a HSDPA 3G modem, an OpenGL ES 3D graphics chip, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and much more…
For a detailed overview of it’s technical specification and the story behind it, see my other post[2].
Testing
The first three “GTA04 Early-Adopter Boards” arrived at the labs of Golden Delicious Computers in Munich[3] and successfully went through the semi-automated hardware validation test. The remaining GTA04 EA boards are expected to arrive later this week.
Future
After those remaining boards passed the test, they are ready to ship to their new owners, who are already very excited about their new free smartphones and ready to develop free software for it.
It is expected that the FreeSmartphone.org[4] middleware will quickly support the GTA04, which makes it possible to run phone distributions like SHR[5], QtMoko[6] and Aurora[7] on it. And of course Debian GNU/Linux will run on the Goldelico GTA04 as well, as it is the default OS on the EA boards[8].
Support
If you want to know how you can support this project, which now needs to shoulder the production of the next batch of GTA04 boards, which will then be available to the public, you have serveral opportunities:
- Make a donation to the project [9], so Golden Delicious Computers can stock the chips needed for new GTA04 boards.
- Buy a cool Letux 400 [10] MIPS Minibook, so Golden Delicious Computers can clear their warehouse, to stock GTA04 parts.
- Preorder a GTA04 replacement board [9] for your Neo 1973/Freerunner, after it became available again.
- Spread the word about this [1] awsome project.
Links
[1] GTA04 project – gta04.org
[2] specs and story of the GTA04 – blog.slyon.de
[3] Golden Delicious Computers – goldelico.com
[4] FreeSmartphone.org project – freesmartphone.org
[5] SHR project – shr-project.org
[6] QtMoko project – qtmoko.org
[7] Aurora project – wiki.freesmartphone.org
[8] GTA04 Debian rootfs – projects.goldelico.com
[9] Preorder a GTA04/donate – handheld-linux.com
[10] Buy a Letux 400 Minibook – handheld-linux.com
Please do not lock down the firmware, that would be a monumentally stupid idea.
> The WiFi, GSM/UTMS and other firmware I mean.
Please push your patches upstream, several years later, the mainline Linux kernel does *NOT* support the GTA02 aka FreeRunner.
I don’t have sent the patches upstream yet because I wanna get all the stuff working on top of main line first.
Then I’ll clean it all up based on linux-next and commit it as a big patchset.
One thing is to write working code, another thing is to format the patches in a manner that the kernel maintainers will accept them 🙂