nomeata’s mind shares - Openmoko

GNUnify started

mail@joachim-breitner.de (nomeata) — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 07:26:00 +0100

Yesterday night I arrived in Pune for the GNUnify conference where I’m a speaker. I should speak more often at such conferences, they really pamper the speakers: I was picked up with a car from the train station, brought to a posh restaurant where other speakers were already dining and afterwards accommodated in the guest house of the Symbiosis University, which means a spacious room with my own bathroom (with running hot water) and best of all: Internet connectivity after midnight! Tonight I was alone, the next night I’ll be sharing it with another speaker.

Today we had breakfast at the conference venue and the first talks started. I attended a talk about Openmoko, but nothing new to me so far. I was happy to see Debian listed as one of the Distributions for the FreeRunner, given that I once co-initiated that port. Nevertheless it could not bring me to try using the FreeRunner again, reliability is just not good enough. I asked for the next best (in terms of freedom and geek-compatibility) phone, but there is no obvious good answer. The n700 seems to be a dead end, given that Nokia might ditch Meego. The Geeksphone sounds like a good candidate, but is out of stock.

My Haskell talk will start in 30 minutes. I hope I’ll reach my audience and haskell-cafe will see more Indian names soon... The talks are recorded. I guess I should have dressed better.

Giving up on the FreeRunner (again)

mail@joachim-breitner.de (nomeata) — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 13:29:56 +0100

More than two years ago, I got the most proper free mobile phone ever created, the Openmoko FreeRunner. Unfortunately, things did not go very well. At first, the device was affected by the infamous buzzing hardware issue, making it unusable as a phone. This could be fixed, but even then the device was not reliable: At times, it lost, without any indication, the GSM connection and I’d start missing calls; and the audio quality was still an imposition for people trying to talk to me by telephone. I tried to stick to it for almost one year now, using it as my daily phone and hoping that things would get better, but my patience (and the patience of the people around me) have come to an end. So I’m finally reviving my old and trusty Siemens S35 phone.

I am eying the Nokia N900 phone, which is the most interesting phone for Free Software supporters at the time and, from what I hear, does not suffer from any of technical issues the FreeRunner had. But for now I’ll be content if people can reach and hear me reliably, and for that I don’t need a new, expensive phone.

Buzz free

mail@joachim-breitner.de (nomeata) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:06:49 +0200

My Openmoko FreeRunner suffered from the infamous hardware bug that causes bad buzzing for my dialog partner, making it relatively useless for me. Last week, though, a collegue of my brother fixed it for me (by applying some soldering-skills), and indeed, the audio quality is above bearable now! I plan to get Debian on the FreeRunner up to date again with the other developments in the community now. Or at least soon, depending on how much time I’ll be able to spare.

Openmoko User Meeting in Karlsruhe

mail@joachim-breitner.de (nomeata) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:12:58 +0100

About one hour ago we have finished the first Openmoko user meeting in Karlsruhe. Twelve FreeRunner (and Neo1973) owners have gatherd in the rooms of Entropia (the local CCC club), and discussed the various distributions, learned aboutt the FSO-alternative PyNeo, which was advocated by Josh, compared GPS applications and talked about various other projects and issues.

I collected some statistics about Distribution usage. Most common was SHR, with five users, followed by OM 2008.12 with three users. Single users had Debian, OM testing from pre 2008.12, PyNeo, EmDebian and OM 2008.9 installed. Only counting those who use their FreeRunner as their day-to-day phone, three are using SHR, one OM 2008.12 and one OM testing. I conclude that SHR seems to be a good choice if you want to have a working phone.

Asked about their primary use case for the FreeRunner, almost all mentioned telephony and GPS. Half of the participants want to use it to browse the web, a little less think that games are important. Two people, who came from Stuttgart, see CellHunter as an important use case

Considering that we filled three hours without running out of topics and the good feedback, we will likely have a sequel to this. A date has not been fixed yet, but will be discussed on the openmoko-community mailing list.

BTW: I’m still planning to package the SHR applications for Debian as soon as possible. Only one dependency (libetk) is missing, but according to Lutin from the pkg-e team, it’s almost ready.

Linux Journal on the Neo FreeRunner

mail@joachim-breitner.de (nomeata) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:57:00 +0100

A fellow lodger of my student dormatory just popped in and gave me the December issue of Linux Journal as a gift from his trip to the US (thanks for that!). When I skimmed the front page, I immediatelly noticed the line “Reviewed: OpenMoko’s Neo FreeRunner.” The four page article by Cory Wright contains some general notes on the FreeRunner, a list of things he doesn’t like and – to my surprise – installation instructions for Debian on the FreeRunner! It’s nice to see one’s work used in such public places. I especially liked the line “I must say, the Debian installers sure have improved a lot since the Potato days.” (Of course, the installer for the FreeRunner is mostly a dumb script that can not be compared to the great official debian-installer that you can use on a PC.)

Debian on the FreeRunner

mail@joachim-breitner.de (nomeata) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:01:51 +0200

I’ve been at DebConf for almost two week, but haven’t blogged a lot about it. It’s mostly because we’ve been working on getting Debian to run on the OpenMoko FreeRunner. Today we finally sent out the official annoucement for this, because it seems that the installer script and packages seem to work so far.

Great thing about this is the sheer amount of software that’s now available on my phone. I already blogged about running Xmonad on it, and I have also ran my screen-message program, on it, as can be seen here. I only did minimal testing of the phone features, because it would be relatively expensive here in Argentinia with my German SIM card, but it seems to work as well.

Xmonad on my mobile phone

mail@joachim-breitner.de (nomeata) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 16:46:00 +0200

Here at DebConf 8 in Argentinia, I’m working on getting Debian to work on the OpenMoko Freerunner Smartphone. We are progressing quite nicely, soon having the same features as the official freesmartphone.org image. See the pkg-fso wiki page for more on that.

And why do we want to do that? Because we can use everything in the Debian archive on our phones!

This is the xmonad window manager, programmed in Haskell and usually running on my Desktop, now on my mobile phone! And it’s almost usable. Only problem is that the screen keyboard, metacity-keyboard, gets the focus by xmonad, so I can’t actually type into other windows. This could be fixed by configuring xmonad, but for that, I need to install ghc and I do not have these 280MB left on my SD card...

Update: I even made it on the front page of the xmonad home page with this image:

pam-dbus: authentication by bubbles

mail@joachim-breitner.de (nomeata) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 07:19:00 +0200

Imagine you have a device, such as a linux phone, that allows login via ssh, e.g. when on a wireless network. You don’t want to set a password with the (limited) phone UI. On the other hand, you don’t want to allow passwordless root logins into your phone. But you do want the ability to login via ssh, after all that’s why you have bought a linux smartphone. This led me to the idea of a pam module and corresponding UI piece that asks the currently logged in user: „Hey, someone tries to login. Is that ok or not?“ This might also be useful for guest accounts on regular laptops. For more on that, see my last blog post.

So I hacked it together (actually twice, due to some unfortunate use of rm at some point), invested most of the time in learning more about the python garbage collector vs. callbacks, explicitly marked global variables and proper automake stuff. In the end I got, well, just what I wanted. A simple pam module, dubbed pam-dbus that sends a request via the dbus system bus and an autostart program (written in python for now, but I might re-implement it in C) that uses notification-daemon to get confirmation from the user.

You are welcome to try the sources and binary debian packages or have a look at the darcs repository for pam-dbus (with debian/ directory, repository browser). This will end up in Debian later, I guess.

Update: Erik Johansson pointed out that if you want to use this with ssh, you need to set UsePAM yes in /etc/ssh/ssd_config.

One Week with an OpenMoko Freerunner

mail@joachim-breitner.de (nomeata) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:18:00 +0200

About one week ago, I received my OpenMoko Freerunner. This is an openly developed mobile phone that runs purely on Free Software. So this is what I have to tell about it.

The hardware

It was smaller than I thought, and is quite light. My girlfriend says it’s ugly, but I’m fine with the look of it. Besides being a GSM-phone, it comes with some nice gimmics: GPS, accelerometer, WLAN. The touchscreen works fine, although I don’t have anything to compare it with.

The software

The system it comes with, even after upgrading, is still very rough. It mostly works for doing phone calls and SMSs, but there are a number of unsolved quirks that prevent me from using the Freerunner as my sole phone for now. The suspend mode is left too often, resulting in a battery life of about eight hours, and there are issues with the audio for the conversation partners, who will hear static and echoes. But, as this is free software, there is hope that this will be fixed eventually.

Development

The OpenMoko distribution is based on Openembedded, which uses bitbake for building software. So if I got it right, and this is not sure, because documentation is rare and spread, there is the git repository at git.openmoko.org, which is a copy of the openembedded git repository. This contains bitbake recipies for all the packages, which includes where they can be downloaded, the package metadata (such as dependencies and version numbers) and sometimes patches. These recipies reference upstream tarballs or subversion URLs. For the “native” OpenMoko applications, the source is in the OpenMoko subversion repository.

One of the suggested ways of compiling software for the FreeRunner is by using a “toolchain” tarball, that can easily be extracted somewhere and used to build the software from the subversion repository, or other (hopefully autoconf’ed) software. This builds the binaries, but does not produce “proper” .ipk files, so no version number or dependencies.

The other way is the full openembedded setup, made easy using the MokoMakefile. This, automatically, fetches and builds everything needed for the cross compiliation and all available packages, producing the same output as can be found on the openmoko servers. Setting this up requires about 6 gigabytes of storage and takes over a day the first time, but then hacking the phone is relatively painless, as it resolves dependencies and is self-contained.

The community

For a free software project, the state of the community is very important. The OpenMoko seems to suffer from a rush of interested people on the mailing lists, so it’s hard to follow real development in a mass of frequently asked questions and nice ideas from people who have neither an OpenMoko phone nor wil do any coding.

On the other hand, it’s not easy for new contributers. I have written some code that make sure the phone can handle numbers such as 0172/123 456 instead of the “official” +49172123456 in the phonebook and the SMS app, something that other users have complained about as well. But no one could tell me where and how I should submit my patches, and the mail to the mailing list with the patches and the bug report is unanswered. It is not clear, at least to me, who is responsible for what part of the project – quite different to what I’m used to from Debian, where there is a clear list of maintainers for each package, and a well known way of submitting patches (by going through bugs.debian.org).

For interested users, I have published my branch of the git repository at git.nomeata.de, and I will hopefully add more features and bugfixes later – at least when I find out how to properly contribute to OpenMoko.