There will be a table for linux on smartphone people in the dev center. People from various projects are planning to hang out there and do some hacking. I for my part will bring my phone collection and will hopefully spent most of these four days on getting something more working on them.

As the LinuxTag is an international event a thought jumped into my mind. I'm interested in the new Palm Pre. Especially in the hardware and the lower level parts. Anybody coming to the event who has such a device? If yes, please make sure you grab me and we can have a talk. I would like to see the device and maybe gather some informations on the device itself via a root shell. :)

Due to some money constraints I will not be able to buy one right now. (Yeah, I know it's CDMA and I'm not able to use it here in germany as a phone, still I believe that if we want to work with this device we should do so as early as possible and there is enough to do before the GSM version will get released). Anyway, LinuxTag may be an event where people with such a device are around. :)

I really hoped for modem communication during the weekend. That did not happen, but we start to get a real good understanding how the system works. We documented all the dirty details in the wiki.

Wish us look, or better help us, to get get the modem working soon. Then it is finally time to poke the rest of the FSO team to support it as a target device.

The main focus is to get the modem communication working. We are pretty sure that we understand how the modem is connected and how it is supposed to get driven. Even better Harald already wrote a driver for it. SPI slave part, linux tty layer integration, state machine it is all there. Still after nights and days debugging it we still not have it working.

This turns out into a major blocker now. Without the modem communication we can't start serious FSO integration and if the progress on this stalls to long it will be doomed as yet another project that may still make fun, but would not get the momentum it deserves, hardware is no longer available and so forth.

So we hope to get some progress with a high motivated face-to-face meeting over the weekend. We will send out a status afterwards. Stay tuned.

For now we are using the SiRF III chip in NMEA mode. In opposite to the sirf binary mode we are not able to upload allmanac or other fancy things. Still we get a fast TTFF whcih lets me hope that the chip saves this useful data on its own.

One intereresting bit was that we need to drive the UART with a 57600 baudrate to get it working (For ublox we used 9600 so far). Once you figured this out it also tells you about it in a NMEA banner. A bit late. :)

$PSRFTXT,Version GSWLT3.0.0HT_3.1.01.00-SDKLT001P1.00b *4A
$PSRFTXT,ETEN-20070119-NMEA57600_S_EE-LX*2C

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.