Free and Open Source Software and Hardware.
Soon this years Open Hard- and Software Workshop (OHSW) will take place in Garching (near Munich) at the TUM Campus Garching. There will be a lot of intetresting topics to discuss and people to meet. Make sure to drop by if you find some time!
The agenda and further details are now available online:
The OpenPhoenux GTA04 production is finally making nice process. All the GTA04A4 (Group Tour 1) preorders should be ready and shipped soon!
This is the lastest batch of devices, which has sucessfully passed Golden Delicious Computers’ QA process and fulfilled the high quality claims.
After a lot of production issues had to be solved in the last months, we’ve now found a method which provides us with a good production yield. After switching to vapour phase soldering [0], we got rid of most the soldering problems.
Happy hacking to all new GTA04 owners!
[0] http://lists.goldelico.com/pipermail/gta04-owner/2012-October/003241.html
The OpenPhoenux project by the german company “Golden Delicious Computers” (goldelico) is creating a fully free software compatible mobile handheld plattform, based upon an open hardware design. The first step was to design a motherboard fitting the Openmoko Neo Freerunner, so owners of Openmoko phones could “upgrade” their devices to state of the art hardware.
To finance the production of the first big batch of GTA04 boards, goldelico collected preorders of interested people [0]. This “Group Tour” enabled them to start production of about 200 boards, which started to ship to it’s new owners in May 2012 and the last ones are going to be shipped in the coming weeks. Now – about one year and a lot of production complications later – the first batch of GTA04A4 boards is finished [1] and the next one is being prepared [2]. It will include the new GTA04A5 board design, providing some minor bug fixes, and a now working production process.
If you’re interested in one of the new GTA04A5 boards, please subscribe to the OpenPhoenux-Community mailinglist, to get notified about the next production batch and the next round of preorder collection.
It is also possible to register your non-binding interest in one of the new GTA04a5 boards, by using the “Wishlist” functionality, this enables goldelico to estimate the demand and thus the next batch’s size.
Register non-binding interest: http://www.handheld-linux.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04
Visit the project’s website at: www.OpenPhoenux.org
The Letux 2804 is a smartphone providing a 2.8” touchscreen and a GTA04 core. It’s case can be produced by a 3D printer.
Technical Specifications:
The Letux 7004 is a free software centric tablet, powered by a 7.0” touchscreen and the same GTA04 core, as it’s small brother Letux 2804. This tablet was developed while solving the GTA04 production problems and is in the prototyping phase at the moment. So it’s not yet ready to order, unfortunately.
Technical Specifications:
If you’re interested in high quality open hardware, “Made in Germany”, which is fully compatible with you favorite free and open source software, you should definitely track the projects mentioned above and jump in to get one of those great devices once you’re ready. I’m absolutely satisfied with my GTA04A3 early adopter board, which I’m happily using since over one year!
[0] http://lists.goldelico.com/pipermail/gta04-owner/2011-November/000679.html
[1] http://lists.goldelico.com/pipermail/community/2012-September/000091.html
[2] http://lists.goldelico.com/pipermail/community/2012-October/000103.html
I took part in the “LPI Linux Essentials” Beta program at LinuxTag 2012 in Berlin (May 23rd, 2012). Today I got my official certificate, finally. I’m now recognized as an approved Linux and Open Source enthusiast and supporter:
In my opinion the Linux Essentials program is a nice thing, especially it’s intention to get young people at school in touch with the basics of computers and the ideals of Linux and Open Source Software. I hope the Linux Essentials recognition will broaden, now that it is officially started and find it’s way into more schools.
If you’re interested in the LPI Linux Essentials Certificate, please have a look at it’s official website:
https://www.lpi.org/linux-certifications/introductory-programs/linux-essentials
This video shows the Openmoko/Goldelico GTA04 booting SHR Linux in 17 seconds.
Note: SHR is not yet optimized for a fast bootup on the GTA04.
If you’re interrested to participate in this open hardware and free and open source software effort, please jump in:
Get your GTA04 now by participating in the GTA04 Group Buy Tour.
Get more information at: www.gta04.org
Here is a nice video featuring the Goldelico OpenPhoenux (GTA04), which is the successor of the Openmoko Freerunner (GTA02).
The video shows the GTA04 board booting and running the QtMoko GNU/Linux distribution which is based upon Debian GNU/Linux and optimized for smartphone usage. Furthermore it shows an early version of the 3D printed GTA04 case, which can easily be modified to everyones needs and ordered at Shapeways.
If you’re interresed in this awesome project, please have a look at its project page www.gta04.org and take part in the GTA04 Group Buy Tour.
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.
Update Nov. 2012: Updated the instructions to the new default U-Boot enviroment.
The new U-Boot system (as of November 2012) provides a graphical multi-boot solution.
If your device is shipped after November 2012 you’ll probably already have this system pre-installed.
Otherwise you’ll have to get the latest hw-validation image from http://download.goldelico.com/gta04 and put it on a specially formated microSD card (using the makesd script). Then boot this special hw-validation microSD card having the AUX button pressed, to flash the new boot system (the screen will trun red while falshing).
After switching back (or reformating) to your normal microSD card you can always access the boot menu by booting the device, having AUX pressed.
Your microSD card can have several partitions, e.g.:
To install the SHR image, you have to untar the image you downloaded to the “rootfs”-partition. Then you have to copy the bootargs.scr file to /boot (on the microSD card).
tar xzvpf shr-image.tar.gz --numeric-owner -C /media/rootfs cp bootargs.scr /media/rootfs/boot/
After you cleanly unmounted the partitions and put the microSD card back into the GTA04 you can boot your device, having the AUX button pressed (to access the boot menu). You’ll be greeted by the graphical U-Boot multiboot selection. Select the partition to boot from (e.g. SD:1 for SHR).
Next, 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.
You can now login via USB networking at: 192.168.7.2
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
You successfully installed SHR on your GTA04.
For further information or if you have any issues, please consult the SHR wiki.
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.
Update: Follow the efforts here: 3D printed GTA04 Case
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.
As I never did any 3D work before I started with the easiest part – the battery cover:
The printed part fits nicely on my existing Openmoko Neo Freerunner (GTA02) case, which contains my GTA04 board at the moment:
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.
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.
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.
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%)
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…
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!
[0] http://www.doodle.com/sh6insnivnvqyz7h
[1] http://www.handheld-linux.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04 Group Tour
HP the company which bought Palm some time ago just announced, that they are going to release webOS as open source software! The Linux kernel side of webOS was open souce since the beginning, with a few exceptions like the PowerVR 3D driver and the touchscreen driver.
We’ll see how far HP will go and what parts they’ll really open up (their announcement didn’t mention the modem protocol for example).
webOS is probably the best and most intuitive software running on smartphones today. And was said to be “the iPhone killer”. Unfortunately the first device it was sold on (Palm Pre) wasn’t exactly the best hardware as it had serveral flaws like a bad keyboard slider. Thus webOS wasn’t adopted by masses of developers and suffered from a lack of applications, which in turn made it uninteresting to end users.
I got a Palm Pre in the early days and I also got a HP|Palm Pre2 developer device some months ago, which I still enjoy to use. All in all I enjoyed developing for those devices, too, but it was pretty depressing to reverse engineer parts of the modem protocol, to be able to have it communicate with the FreeSmartphone.org (FSO) middleware and run a really free and open source operating system like SHR.
So with this news from HP what we could probably get in 2012 is:
Let’s hope the best for the mobile FOSS community in 2012!