After this bad joke we can come to some real infos. Harald is working on the kernel full steam ahead. Good progress so far. Sometimes faster sometimes slower.

From my side I concentraded on the OE side so far. Booting into a fso-image is working now. With every new hardware feature the kernel gets support for we can start to integrate it into FSO. GPS and BT are good candidates as they are just attached to UARTs and the enabling/disabling via GPIOs is already in the kernel.

A 'cat /dev/ttySAC2' already gives out some NMEA stancas. SiRF III binary protocol has to wait a bit longer. Next week I'll have some fun with making use of the GPS in frameword. Stay tuned.

If you do software development for profit it is very likely that you work on software you never really use. Isn't this a scary thing? I man how should you know what works and what not? Are you finished when you completed 100% of the spec?

In the free software world on the other hand developers are often driven by scratching own itches. Fixing things they found bad or broken by using the software.

Looking at my desk I can see 7 linux based mobile phones around. Most of the time I used non-Neos as my phone for the daily use. This does not make me better then others devs not using the code they produce. Holger does it, Daniel does it and many colleagues in Taiwan does it. It was time to feel the pain yourself.

Over a week now I'm using my Freerunner as primary phone. Loaded with the latest and hottest on our way to FSO milestone 4. It is an interesting journey. Showing me how much I already miss compared to other phones. Also showing me how much we need to care about stabilize better for our milestones. MS3 was bad in this regard. We hope to do better with MS4.

During this journey I started to write down what annoys me. Annoyes me as a user. Besides all kind of smaller and bigger issues I had to learn that ZenPhone is really not a UI for the daily use. It is a testing apps to expose our interfaces, not more. Really looking forward to the UIs the SHR guys and raster are working on. Perhaps even a nice paroli. We will see.

Still I'm looking forward to it. This time I hopefully have some time to attend the technically talks. I look at you kernel track. And let Harald de-mystify the security of the micro waves around us.

Ease the development of new applications and services. Build your kick ass stuff on top of a good fundament. And if it does not give you what you need, extend it. It's not like other commercial frameworks where you have to deal with what you get. It's open, take it, extend it, send patches. :)

Let's hope the framework team get the resources they need for getting it done. I also have some private ideas how to contribute here. Once I have something ready I let you know.

As code is better then words, take a look at their git repos.

I'm not leaving with bad feelings. Still over the last months I disagreed with decisions and directions, got frustrated with the work I had to do. Not the best conditions for a productive work environment.

However I still like to see OpenMoko success. As open as possible mobile phone hardware on which I can flash all kind of software I like. Not fighting against vendor policies but having almost all options I like. Still sounds great to me.

Over the last 13 months I learned a lot. For both, coding and business. Working with some great people from the FOSS community from all over the world and with great taiwanese engineers. (Watch out for these guys, they are awesome but shy) Made new friends and had to deal with an interesting different culture.

It was an awesome but exhausting trip. It's over for now.

I plan to do no paid work for the next 1-2 months, perhaps even longer. In this time-frame I need to come back to the study life I had before and take some rest. Read some good books, hang out with friends and don't worry about deadlines.

After that we will see what kind of work will come in. At least it must be not as much time consuming as OpenMoko was. Need to focus on my studies.

I'm interested in SDIO wifi cards that could be supported within a 2.6 linux kernel. Using them to add wifi connectivity to my EZX devices would be nice. EZX devices are based on PXA270 with full SD or microSD slots.

It would now be interesting to know if the Spectec SDIO cards are based on the Atheros 6000 SDIO chip. OpenMoko is working on a GPL driver for this chip. That would hopefully reduce the amount of work to get it running on other devices.

So anybody knows more about the chip Spectec use?

regards

Stefan Schmidt

BTW, roh needs to start blogging. For propaganda purpose only of course. :)

So the toy is called BT-451 and has a u-blox ANTARIS4 SuperSense chip build-in. Getting it to work is easy:

hcitool scan
rfcomm connect hci0 

After this you have a serial port (perhaps /dev/bluetooth/rfcomm/0) where all the NMEA data comes in. Just give this one to gpsd and you can use it in multiple applications. I also heard that this is even easier with gypsy. No more need to deal with rfcomm yourself. That screams for a test once it is in debian.

There is some more stuff I like about the BT-451. Once it had a fix I was able to put it in a pocket of my jacket, sit in my car and it still gets the position. Tested with driving home with my notebook on the seat next to be and tracking the drive with navit. Daniel also discovered that the USB plug is not only for charging, but also shows up as ACM modem and spies out the NMEA on /dev/ttyACM0. And once connected via USB it also works without a battery.

The above mentioned navit is one of the most promising stuff I like to use regulary with the GPS. It's a navigation system with a routing engine. Not only download maps and show them, but do real routing with vector based maps. As we all know maps are problematic. OpenStreetMap is working on this problem. Until this is useable everywhere I like to have some commercial maps I can route with on my linux system. Don't expect some vendor has got this ready. :(

But FOSS has, as almost, an answer for me. Navit support different vector maps for commercial CDs. Just buy such one, copy the files and navit handles the rest. Great.

No I just need to test the navit setup on my Neos. :)

• Alex Zhang worked out some of the differences on the sweet A1200 device. He offered patches to get at least usbnet working with the EOC chip and better support for the 18bpp framebuffer and touchscreen.

• Daniel Ribeiro finally got the ezx-asoc driver working and was able to do a voice call. The first with our 2.6 based kernel.

• Antonio Ospite made some nice progress in getting the GPS information on the gps-enabled A780's from mux14 and worked out the used protocol. This mean we are close before having full NMEA output from it and feed it into gpsd which makes the whole informations available to other applications.

Motivated from all this great work Mickey and me spent more or less a full day with OpenEZX work. Catching up with the newest stuff and getting OpenEmbedded integration into an even better shape as it already was. (Thanks for koen on taking care of this most of the time).

Besides this there was some ongoing work to make OpenMoko more useful on devices with QVGA screens. Based on the work Philipp Zabel we started an QVGA theme. Some artwork still needs a bit rework but it looks already pretty good. Mickey made some pictures and will link them from his on blog entry I guess.

Once wyrm has merged the outstanding patches into the svn and we have done more work on the QVGA theme we will go for an snapshot release for with kernel and rootfs.

Mickey and me gave our talks about Open{Moko,EZX} and presented the community view in discussions.

Besides the different focus the event was also a lot smaller then the ones I usually attend. Around 40 people. So most of the attendees were speaker as well. Mixed up with the fact that many of the people are doing research in this area gave the conference a academic touch.

In the last weeks Mickey and me pondered if we really should attend as our travel and working schedules are pretty full, we did not got plane tickets and had to go two 10 hours train rides, etc.

In the end I'm happy we decided to go. Besides the talks especially the small group of people was a good place for interesting and informative discussions. Coming from the FOSS world and doing not much business besides OpenMoko it was quite interesting for me what people with a more commercial background are doing with mobile devices and what benefits and drawbacks they see in using FOSS for example.

During the days and nights we had some working session with normal OpenMoko stuff but also some hours on catching up with OpenEZX stuff. But that's another blogpost.