Openmoko / OpenPhoenux

Free platforms Go On, despite former giant’s NoGo

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This is an official PR announcement from the FOSS community.
Different translations are available here: wiki.freesmartphone.org /CZ /DE /ES /PL

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011 – Despite the recent departure of a former mobile handset manufacturer giant, several developing teams and their users are actually… happily hacking on. With the longterm goal of a fully Free Software platform for embedded systems, the teams of FSO, SHR, QtMoko, Replicant and AndroidOnFreerunner invite others to join and participate in projects which are not driven left and right by the  unpredictable follies of corporate management.

«We have been making a steady progress throughout the years. The major requirement has been a solid, Linux supported hardware, and for that we have been using Openmoko, Palm Pre, N900 and HTC phones – and ambitioned forthcoming projects like Goldelico’s GTA04. All these devices are providing a great development platform for those who seek truly open and independent system for their learning, coding and even professional or commercial use.» — says Dr. Michael Lauer from FSO.

There’s a temporary advantage when big players like FIC (Openmoko), Nokia+Intel (MeeGo) and Google (Android) invest in Free Software Projects. Though if the project contains parts of proprietary code, it depends on the investor. At some point the investor might abandon the project and the community. Then the project is doomed because the community can not fix any bugs in the proprietary code or adapt it to newer/other APIs.

«We believe in another model – proven to be both sustainable and satisfactory – where everybody can contribute their knowledge and learn at the same time, without proprietary code blobs and no closed doors boardroom meetings. This allows us to use existing hardware even when the maker decided to abandon it all together or is not willing to update it anymore. Anybody is able to commit, read, comment on or download the source code.»

The teams invite both users and developers to look at their project pages, the current results, motivations and needs, as well as to join the mailing lists, wikis, forums, IRC rooms or what  not, to chat, listen and eventually contribute in order to create the free and open embedded platform for their devices.

The communities of FSO, SHR, QtMoko, Replicant and Android on Freerunner

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Virtual Keyboard

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vkbd
I just found this little EFL-testapp:

It’s an app written by Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri. It’s an Iphone like virtual keyboard. You can find the sourcecode on googlecode..

I had to apply a little change to the code, to get it running on the Freerunner.
I changed lines 206-210 to this:

if ecore.evas.engine_type_supported_get("software_16_x11"):
    ee = ecore.evas.SoftwareX11_16(w=WIDTH, h=HEIGHT)

else:
    print "warning: x11-16 is not supported, fallback to x11"
    ee = ecore.evas.SoftwareX11(w=WIDTH, h=HEIGHT)

Maybe someone likes to modify this code and build a real virtural keyboard for SHR out of it?
I hope i could motivate someone, as this would be a really nice keyboard.

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fsoraw and neon

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Today I decided to try out the picture-viewing-app “neon” [1] [2] on my Freerunner. This app is really amazing! It is pretty fast and provides very cool features like auto rotating images by dimensions, auto rotating window using accelerometers and of course zooming, manual rotating images, slide-show, the basic stuff. And if you use the b_and_w theme it looks pretty elegant.

All in all i can say: I love this app! And therefore i created a ticket in the SHR-Trac to add neon to the SHR-Feed [3].

After a while of using neon I found a few things that couldn’t satisfy my expectations:

  • 1st the white background of the b_and_w theme, which is visible if a picture doesn’t fill the screen. But a short look in the neon-SVN and one edje_cc later I had created a edje-file for b_and_w theme, which has a black background [4].

    neon-b_and_w

  • 2nd issue was that the display of the Freerunner blanked while looking at pictures. This is where “fsoraw” [5] [6] comes on. Fsoraw (FSO Resource Allocation Wrapper) is a wrapper utility to launch applications preallocating system resources from FSO. That means you can activate e.g. the “Display”-resource, just by editing the .desktop file of an app. This way I edited my /usr/share/applications/neon.desktop to allocate the “CPU” and “Display” resources, to avoid suspending and display blanking. Furthermore, I customised the neon parameters to activate the picture and window auto rotating stuff, to use the b_and_w theme and to start in my “Bilder” (=pictures) folder. The Exec line of the .desktop file now looks like this: 
    Exec=fsoraw -r CPU,Display -- neon -f -r 0 -R 1 -t b_and_w /media/mmcblk0p3/Bilder

Have fun with neon and use fsoraw (e.g. for mokomaze, too):

Exec=fsoraw -r CPU,Display mokomaze

[1] neon project page
[2] neon in om-wiki
[3] shr #596
[4] download this edje-file
[5] fsoraw project page
[6] fsoraw in om-wiki

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FSO Milestone 5.5 is out!

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A few minutes ago mickey released the long-awaited milestone 5.5 of the FreeSmartphone.Org (FSO) smartphone middleware.

Check out the git-commit here: http://git.freesmartphone.org
Big thanks to the whole FSO team for this great piece of software!

Now let’s look forward to the new FSO 2.0 API-Implementation – called cornucopia, which is rewritten in Vala. Vala is a compiled language, which leads to an performance boost in comparison with the FSO 1.0 implementation, which is written in Python.

Openmoko: The Echo Bug

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Since a very long time there is a very annoing bug (#1267), the ‘Echo Bug’. But about a week ago there was a very interesting post on the community-mailinglist: Echo issue on OM2008.08 solved, which describes how to solve this bug.

The mail provides a patch and binary files, too. So we don’t have to compile code to get the fix.
Installing the binary files is pretty easy, just follow these steps:

1. download files

http://danielnoethen.de/libqtopiaphonemodem.so.4.3.2
http://danielnoethen.de/gsmhandset.state

2. upload these files to you Neo

scp libqtopiaphonemodem.so.4.3.2 root@moko:/opt/Qtopia/lib/libqtopiaphonemodem.so.4.3.2

scp gsmhandset.state root@moko:/usr/share/openmoko/scenarios/gsmhandset.state

3. restart Qtopia

/etc/init.d/xserver-nodm restart

That’s it!

Now you should be able to call someone without annoing him with his own echo.

I tested this fix on my FDOM-20080927, but it should also work on every distribution using the Qtopia phone-stack. Furthermore the fix is known by the developers and is ‘in testing’, so it should get into the official sources soon.

Attention: as zecke says in his post (http://zecke.blogspot.com) overwriting the binary library-file is a very dirty way to get this fix and it can lead to chaos in the packagemanager. A cleaner way would be to use the openmoko-testing feeds and upgrade using the package-manager.

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Openmoko Report #1

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I got my Freerunner about two months ago and I made a few experiences until today. Now I want to share these experiences.

FDOM

In my last post – Openmoko: Distributionen (it’s in German) – I presented (subjectiv) the positive and negative ascpects of the different available distributions for the Neo.
I want to add FDOM to this list, a distribution which I use on my Freerunner now as my daily phone.
The FDOM-distribution is based on om2008.9, is enhanced with some fixes from the community, has a lot of applications preinstalled and has a good preconfiguration.

pro’s

  • phone-basics work (with qtopia-x11)

  • PIM-basics work (with qtopia-calendar)

  • GPS mapping works (with TangoGPS)

  • mp3 playback works (with Pythm)

  • power-management works pretty well

  • phone awakes from suspend on incoming call/sms

con’s

  • battery life of 1-2 days (it’s enough for daily use, but should be more)

  • Qtopia version is 4.3, which is very slow

QtExtended

Nokia released a prerelease of Qtopia 4.4, which is now called QtExtended. I tried this release because there was a lot of positive feedback on the mailinglists.
But in my opinion it isn’t that good. One good point was that QtExtended 4.4 it is much more responsive than version 4.3 but the show-stopper was the broken power-management: the phone doesn’t awake from suspend on incoming call or sms and the battery-life is very short if i don’t set it to suspend.

FSO

I tried the FSO-testing-images a few days ago, too. And I saw that they made good progress with the framework. Big praise to mickeyl and his team, you made really good work! The resource-management is very nice. For example it turns on the GPS if you need it and turns it back off if you don’t use it anymore.
The FSO-phone-application “Zhone” is functional and has all the needed features, but I’m looking forward to paroli…

Paroli

In my eyes Paroli is a very interesting project. It’s a phone-application (dialer, sms, contacts), written in python and elf, which uses the FSO-framework. It is going to replace the qtopia-x11 as phone stack when om2008 resp. om2009 and FSO gets merged. Unfortunately I was not able to get paroli up and running on my FSO-testing-image.

Has anyone got any status-report and/or screenshots of paroli? The only news I can get are the code commits: http://code.google.com/p/paroli/updates/list

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