Next week I will spent the better part of the week at the LinuxTag. I did not submit a talk this year and I will try to spent my time on hacking and relaxing. :)
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. :)
Yesterday I got my order from ipmart. Two PCB of the Motorola A1200 Ming device.
I was quite surprised as I have seen them the first time on ipmart, but thinking about it a second time and taking the device copy scene from china into account it was not surprising anymore. :)
One usecase could be to measure some connections you are not able to with all the ICs mounted. Given the knowledge, 2.4 source code and our patches for 2.6 we already have for this device it will be more of an collector's item.
Over the last week, directly after LinuxTag, I was in Vachdorf. If you like to know more about this small village take a look at OSM. Of course we mapped the whole village while being there.
The reason for being there was the TechWeek from Pengutronix, a company from my area doing a lot linux embedded projects for the industry. I already known some of the people working there privately. While being there I got known to the other ones. I must admit that it is a nice bunch of smart people loving what they are doing. What I actually appreciate a lot is their work to get their patches into mainline, even if it costs a lot of time and money. This is a not-so-common practice in the industry linux embedded world.
While hanging out there and having good talks about git, patch handling and submission workflows I spend most of my time working on geting some of the EZX patches mainline ready. We now have a svn branch that contains patches sitting directly on top of the arm git tree pxa branch. While working on this I also started to submit three one-line fixes upstream to get used to the arm-linux workflow. 2 Are already in the git tree, one is acked and waiting in incoming.
I enjoyed the week. Smart people, good food and hacking on stuff you like. Life could be that easy...
Next tuesday I'll be on my way to Berlin for the LinuxTag. It will be some busy days between giving a talk, an interview for Radio Tux and hanging out at the booth of my ex-employer.
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.
Over the last days I did some changes to the SCMs for my private projects. Some got migrated from svn to git. Also some git repos changed the location. Please refer to the overview websites if you run into trouble:
Since I left OpenMoko I have found some time to work on OpenEZX again. There are two nice things that happened since then.
The first one was that I got an 18bpp patch for all the second generation devices working. At least pxafb and fbcon are working fine now. I still need to test X more. :) The patch was from the gumstix patchset. Thank you guys.
The second was the boot_usb 0.2.0 release. We use this little tool a lot and SVN is stable most of the time. Especially after Daniel Ribeiro added support for initrd, commandline and setting the machine ID a release was needed.
Mickey already blogged about it. This is something we talked about a lot lately. Sometimes frustrated sometimes with hope. It is something we never got right since the beginning.
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.
Dear Lazyweb,
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
Bluetooth GPS reciever just rock. Small, easy to use, no cables and useable with different devices. Once my day-by-day gadgets and notebook have all one build-in I can get it of it, but that will take some time.
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. :)
It's a long time since I really spent some hours on doing OpenEZX only work. A lot great stuff happened since then:
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.
