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July 20, 2010Antonio Ospite: Supercool Linux
We all know linux is cool, don't we? However these people at SuperFreddo make it supercool (freddo is the Italian word for cool/cold).  SuperFreddo is a frozen food chain here in Naples Italy, and the penguin in their logo has an interesting resemblance to Tux, the linux kernel mascot: the contour is not exact and it is wearing a hat and a scarf, but you just look at the feet —at their inclination— and you have no more doubts. I am not on Facebook, so maybe some of you could point out to them where the designer of their logo could have taken inspiration from. I attach a couple of pictures of their shopping bags, just for the records, and to remind people that from 2011 plastic bags are banned in Italy. Attached images:
  June 04, 2010Antonio Ospite: Write access to OpenEmbedded
Since late May 2010 I've been given write access to the OpenEmbedded repository. Thanks to the OE devs who supported me. May 27, 2010Antonio Ospite: Neat compile/run cycle with git and OpenEmbedded
No matter how much careful we are when writing code, whatever changes we are making to a piece of software we must test them before production, even Donald Knuth once said: Moreover, if the software we are working on is targeting an embedded system and needs cross-compilation and depends on other software, then testing can be more tedious: we have to prepare patches/archives and instruct the target SDK to pick our latest code, or we could code directly in the SDK working tree, but that would not be very clean. If you use git and OpenEmbedded there is a very neat way to build directly from our own working directory on the filesystem. By developing with git from the start, your changes are ready to be sent upstream as soon as they are proven to be OK. Git cloning from filesystemI am not going to repeat how nice, sleek and whatnot git is, just let me show you again how flexible it is: you can easily “re-clone” from a git clone on the filesystem, no need to have any servers around: $ cd /tmp $ git clone file:///home/ao2/Proj/EZX/OE/framework See? By only using the Fetching the latest code from our git working dir with OpenEmbeddedOpenEmbedded uses the bitbake task executor, .bb files (called recipes) are used to describe bitbake tasks, they are generally used to define packages for distributing some software, and the source code of the software can be fetched in many different ways; in this case we are editing a recipe which uses the git fetcher, let's take a look at the original
DESCRIPTION = "The reference implementation of the freesmartphone.org framework APIs"
HOMEPAGE = "http://www.freesmartphone.org"
AUTHOR = "FreeSmartphone.Org Development Team"
SECTION = "console/network"
DEPENDS = "python-cython-native python-pyrex-native"
LICENSE = "GPL"
SRCREV = "93673aa09cafc8fb5cfc3cb4055a73e25e595b70"
PV = "0.9.5.9+gitr${SRCPV}"
PR = "r3"
PE = "1"
inherit distutils update-rc.d python-dir
INITSCRIPT_NAME = "frameworkd"
INITSCRIPT_PARAMS = "defaults 29"
SRC_URI = "${FREESMARTPHONE_GIT}/framework.git;protocol=git;branch=master \
file://frameworkd \
file://frameworkd.conf \
"
SRC_URI_append_shr = "file://oeventsd-use-opimd-signals.patch;patch=1"
S = "${WORKDIR}/git"
...
...
we can change the path in
diff --git a/recipes/freesmartphone/frameworkd_git.bb b/recipes/freesmartphone/frameworkd_git.bb
index dac7fe9..ddae81d 100644
--- a/recipes/freesmartphone/frameworkd_git.bb
+++ b/recipes/freesmartphone/frameworkd_git.bb
@@ -4,9 +4,9 @@ AUTHOR = "FreeSmartphone.Org Development Team"
SECTION = "console/network"
DEPENDS = "python-cython-native python-pyrex-native"
LICENSE = "GPL"
-SRCREV = "93673aa09cafc8fb5cfc3cb4055a73e25e595b70"
+SRCREV = "${AUTOREV}"
PV = "0.9.5.9+gitr${SRCPV}"
-PR = "r3"
+PR = "r4"
PE = "1"
inherit distutils update-rc.d python-dir
@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ inherit distutils update-rc.d python-dir
INITSCRIPT_NAME = "frameworkd"
INITSCRIPT_PARAMS = "defaults 29"
-SRC_URI = "${FREESMARTPHONE_GIT}/framework.git;protocol=git;branch=master \
+SRC_URI = "git:///home/ao2/Proj/EZX/OE/framework;protocol=file;branch=freescale_neptune \
file://frameworkd \
file://frameworkd.conf \
"
Now we are set, we can build packages as usual and test our local changes on the target system: $ bitbake -c clean recipes/freesmartphone/frameworkd_git.bb $ bitbake recipes/freesmartphone/frameworkd_git.bb April 04, 2010Michael Lauer: Joining twitter
I’m now on twitter. I’ll use that for small status updates on the various open source related work I’m doing, e.g. FSO, OpenEmbedded, Vala, and the like. Follow me, if you can February 27, 2010Michael Lauer: Qt suddenly got interesting again
After Trolltech dropping the ball with the community back in the old days of Opie, I pretty much gave up on Qt (and C++) apart from accepting some contract work, so my C++/Qt skills would not get too rusty. Since my nightmares with getting something fluid out of Gtk+ (back in the Openmoko days), I did not have the chance to do much UI work — the freesmartphone.org middleware kept me busy enough. I have been watching Qt progressing though, and ever since they introduced Qt Kinetic and QML it became very interesting for me again. QML looks like EFL’s Edje been thought through — don’t get me wrong, Edje was groundbreaking (as most of Rasterman’s work) when it made its debut, however in my opinion it got stuck in the middle and never lived up to what I was expecting from it. Once QML ships with Qt — hopefully in the next minor or at least major version of Qt, I will get back on doing some FOSS work on application level to complete creating a smart phone stack. That’s going to be fun! February 08, 2010Michael Lauer: F(SO|OS)DEM 2010
Just came back from FOSDEM 2010, which — after skipping the last incarnation — was a great inspiring and productive event. The Openmoko devroom we originally requested was declined, however thanks to the initiative of Serdar Dere, it turned out we could snatch a last minute 3 hours timeslot that was left open by the Xorg guys. Very shortly we prepared a schedule and managed to get a nice program which was very well received.
Due to the short notice, we could not manage to create a video recording infrastructure, so I’m afraid this year we can only provide the slides — which are a notoriously bad substitute for real talks though. We try to improve for next year — if we can get a devroom again. The pictures you are seeing are courtesy Dr. Nikolaus Schaller from Goldelico, btw. — thanks!
The FOSDEM team did certainly improve its organization over the last years, I was very pleased to see some of my criticism being taken into account. Apart from the lack of good coffee in Brussels (which the FOSDEM team probably is unguilty for), I can’t complain about anything. Even WiFi worked tremendously well on saturday. I still think due to the size of the ever growing interest in this conference that the ULB as location should seriously be reconsidered though. The special service transport on sunday to the main station is a great idea, folks — thanks a lot! Funnily enough, half of the ICE that took me to/from Frankfurt/Main to Brussels Zuid was filled with hackers, btw.
I have met some interesting people working on mobile devices, such as dcordes, leviathan, GNUtoo, cr2, larsc, heinervdm, etc. It’s great to see there is still momentum in real mobile FOSS architectures (i.e. something besides the Android, Maemo, or WebOS systems). I’m glad to tell you that this year we will see an exciting breakthrough in freesmartphone.org middleware supporting new platforms, i.e. progress on the HTC Dream and the Palm Pre is looking _very_ well. Stay tuned for more details appearing here soon.
I wish every conference would be like that. The only slightly disappointing thing was the cross-buildsystem-session in the embedded room. Just when I was expecting the discussion about the problems and potential collaboration to start, the time for the session was over. February 03, 2010Michael Lauer: FOSDEM 2010
Due to some lucky coincidences, we got a devroom at this year’s FOSDEM. I’ll be there, presenting a short overview about the history of the Openmoko project as well as a wrap-up of the latest work on the freesmartphone.org mobile devices middleware. Hope to see you there! February 01, 2010Michael Lauer: fso-boot
I’m fed up with booting my Linux-based smartphones like desktop-systems. Two major developments will help me accomplish enormous improvements in boot speed:
I’m going to carry out the following two tasks in OE:
I’ll do that for the freesmartphone.org adaptation for the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1, Google ADP-1), which I’m running on 2.6.32 (necessary for devtmpfs) — stay tuned for the first benchmarks. January 05, 2010Antonio Ospite: Branding patches with git and vim
In linux kernel development there are informal, and yet quite solid, conventions which apply when sharing patches and collaborating during the —public and undisclosed— phase of code peer-review. As some of you may know, all the communications about kernel development happen via e-mail, and there are some tools to ease the task of preparing and sending patches; these tools allow some degree of customization, or “branding” like I am calling it in this case. Let's see how to decorate our patches so that their author is more easily recognizable (and acknowledgeable). Obviously all this doesn't apply only to linux, that's just where my experience come from. Let's step back to summarize a common work-flow used when preparing patches with the git SCM: # clone some repository git clone git://git.example.com/repo.git cd repo.git # create a new development branch and work on it git branch new-dev-branch git checkout new-dev-branch # Commit operation is inexpensive in git, use it $EDITOR fileA $EDITOR fileB git commit fileA fileB $EDITOR fileA git commit fileA # Prepare patches to be sent git format-patch -s --cover-letter master..new-dev-branch # Edit patches to: # - add Cc recipients # - add annotations after the '---' separator, # this does not interfere with commit messages $EDITOR *.patch git send-email --to "Some MailingList <some@mailinglist>" *.patch # When the patches are accepted upstream we can delete # our local development branch git checkout master git branch -D new-dev-branch Now, the patches we are producing this way have the author figuring as the sender, and are signed off according to the Developer Certificate of Origin, but we can still make them more “personal”, for instance we can:
Adding custom headersUsing the I am adding an X-Face header (the source image is attached at the end of the post):
X-Face: z*RaLf`X<@C75u6Ig9}{oW$H;1_\2t5)({*|jhM<pyWR#k60!#=#>/Vb;]yA5<GWI5`6u&+
;6b'@y|8w"wB;4/e!7wYYrcqdJFY,~%Gk_4]cq$Ei/7<j&N3ah(m`ku?pX.&+~:_/wC~dwn^)MizBG
!pE^+iDQQ1yC6^,)YDKkxDd!T>\I~93>J<_`<4)A{':UrE
To set this you can do: git config --global --add format.headers '' git config --global --edit and then add the string in double quotes, remembering to escape characters in the X-Face as git-config(1) Manual Page says:
Which in my case gives:
[format]
headers = "X-Face: z*RaLf`X<@C75u6Ig9}{oW$H;1_\\2t5)({*|jhM<pyWR#k60!#=#>/Vb;]yA5<GWI5`6u&+\n ;6b'@y|8w\"wB;4/e!7wYYrcqdJFY,~%Gk_4]cq$Ei/7<j&N3ah(m`ku?pX.&+~:_/wC~dwn^)MizBG\n !pE^+iDQQ1yC6^,)YDKkxDd!T>\\I~93>J<_`<4)A{':UrE\n"
Now the recipients can see my X-Face in my patches, provided that their MUA can decode it... Note: please don't copy and paste this X-Face blindly, this is my X-Face, you want to have your very own. Appending a signature to the cover letterIf you are using the Vim editor to compose the cover letter and annotate patches it is very easy to make it add your signature to the first mail in your patchset. Download my signature_block.vim into
" Append a signature block to cover letters generated with git-format-patch
autocmd BufRead 0000-cover-letter.patch silent call AddSignature('~/.signature') | w
autocmd BufRead 0000-cover-letter.patch autocmd! BufRead 0000-cover-letter.patch
Now the first time you open a file named Attached images:
 September 25, 2009Michael Lauer: GSM Palm Pre on the horizon
As mentioned, the freesmartphone.org team and community has taken the challenge to put the FSO stack on the Palm Pre which is out next month. The goal is to manage a voice call with the FSO stack within four weeks. The idea behind this is a very important one. With only the Openmoko FreeRunner as a platform, the FSO stack is doomed into oblivion sooner or later, since its a very limited hardware platform — in quantity, but considering the closed alternatives also in quality. Hence, we need to proof that FSO can run on current, competitive hardware — to embrace companies that want to adopt FSO in their niche. The Palm Pre is currently our major hope — all other hardware being either too closed (yes, this includes the Nokia N900) or already outdated. September 13, 2009Michael Lauer: Vala gains support for server-side async dbus
Something wonderful has happened! Jürg Billeter — mastermind of Vala — pushed support for server-side async dbus into Vala. I hope I didn’t annoy him too much (having continuesly pestered for almost a year now), but the net effect is that we can now continue working on fsogsmd, the Vala implementation of our dbus GSM server (see http://docs.freesmartphone.org for an overview of the API). Yay! June 24, 2009Michael Lauer: LinuxTag 2009
I’m on my way to LinuxTag 2009. Instead of a “real booth” like last year, we settled on a developer table in the hacking area — there we can present our Linux on mobile projects such as in a more relaxed way — giving room to dive into some technical issues, when interested folks come around. Find me there, if you’re interested in any of the aforementioned projects. I’ll be there until Friday afternoon. February 17, 2009Michael Lauer: Catching up and plans for 2009
I felt it’s time to recap the stuff that kept me busy the last months and give you an overview over the achievements planned for this year — always focusing the free software movement, of course. freesmartphone.orgLet’s start with the major project I’ve been working on, the freesmartphone.org project, funded by Openmoko, Inc. FSO grows, and it grows in the right directions. We get more API customers — notably the SHR project and the Paroli project — and refine our API and the reference implementation. The 5th milestone has just been released and apart from a major foobar with read-only partitions, it’s pretty good. We are going to fix this OE-inheritance and release a milestone 5.1 in a couple of days. fso-abyss (GSM 07.10 Multiplexing)For some modems — e.g. the TI Calypso (see my previous post on ogsmd and its modems) — until now we have relied on pyneo’s gsm0710muxd. Over the last weeks we found some severe problems (race conditions, buffer overflows) with this though, so I thought I have a shot at developing my own GSM 07.10 Multiplexer. The result is called fso-abyss and is — as with all our software — available at git.freesmartphone.org under a free software license. The major difference to gsm0710muxd is the architecture (and maintainability). While gsm0710muxd combines talking to the serial ports, the pty’s, handling dbus queries, and doing modem specific things, fso-abyss went a different route. At the heart there is a minimal protocol engine implementing GSM 07.10. Since there was already something available in Qtopia — even nicely seperated without any external dependencies — I took that one and factored it out in a dedicated project called libgsm0710 (available in git as well). The idea here is that different interest groups can collaborate on getting the protocol engine right, since not everyone wants a DBus frontend such as implemented in fso-abyss. The next step was writing a VAPI file for glueing the protocol engine to Vala (more about that one in a bit), which has been used to develop the upper layers of fso-abyss. Last but not least, there was the pty implementation, the serial port communications abstraction, and finally the dbus server. The DBus API originally designed in cooperation with pyneo has been enhanced to feature the additional features (only) present in fso-abyss. Apart from the architecture, fso-abyss also can handle virtual serial port signalling, 07.10 test commands, automatic session handling, has a wakeup service, and more. Next up is adding support for the Cinterion mc75i which has some proprietary extensions to GSM 07.10 Basic Multiplexing. dbus-hlid (DBus High Level Introspection DaemonModern DBus APIs are pretty dynamic, i.e. objects can come and go at any time. Depending on the hardware, you may find more or less objects of a certain kind. You can now add infrastructure to query the objects (essentially a duplication of what DBus should provide), or just rely on the existing DBus introspection API. Unfortunately this API is missing some critical features to make it really usable, such as querying objects that implement a certain interface. So I took the plunge and factored this out of the freesmartphone.org frameworkd, since it has broader use. This is the API for it (as introspected by mdbus): Here are examples of how you can use it (demonstrated within a Python shell):
fso-monitordWhile working on implementing GSM time(zone) support for ogsmd, we found we had too few samples, especially since time(zone) information are only sent by few providers all over the world. Moreoever, we missed a generic means to record all the data the frameworkd is sending out via its signals, such as:
To support this (and more), we came up with fso-monitord, which is available from git as well. fso-monitord logs its data to a flat file format that you can send to us to improve our databases or for debugging. We also figured this would be the best place to add a generic frameworkd watchdog — monitoring all fso components — shutting down or restarting components as necessary and also logging incidents such as API violations. What’s next in FSO?For milestone 5.5 (due end of march), we have two major features on the roadmap, namely bluetooth networking (headset profile) and extended PIM support. Milestone 6 will then sport full-fledged networking. Beyond milestone 6 — apart from one major thing, which I’ll cover in a second — we only have some rough plans, such as revamping or refining the subsystems we’re not perfectly happy with (oeventsd and opreferencesd come to mind). Also, alsa audio scenario handling is broken by design, but this is something we have to take up with upstream. The freesmartphone.org reference implementation has been progressing incredibly fast. This is partly due to choosing Python as the implementation language (which has been a wise choice) of our DBus APIs. Now you all know that although I truely love Python (I even wrote a book about it) and try to use it everywhere it fits, I’m very well aware that for the future of the freesmartphone.org project, it might be important to come up with a frameworkd reimplementation in a compiled language — to reduce the footprint and squeak every possible bit of performance out of the (embedded) system. This is why I have decided to encourage a second reference implementation. This one will be written in Vala (I might have mentioned it before, did I?) which is an incredible combination of elegance and performance, featuring a complete lack of any runtime penalties and additional dependencies. It’s simply amazing and I’m seriously thinking about writing an introductionary book about Vala later this year. Anyways, back to the topic, the first bits of this Vala implementation has landed in the freesmartphone.org git in the form of the very successful GSoC project odeviced, written by Sudarshan S. Stay tuned for some amazing FSO runtime speedups coming in autumn and winter this year to your device. XeTexNext to writing software for the freesmartphone.org project, I also found some time to pick up working with my favourite writing tool LyX. LyX, which could be described as a LaTeX frontend, nowadays features integration with the new LaTeX variant XeTex. In contrast to other incarnations such as pdfLaTeX, XeTeX can utilize system fonts such as AAT or OpenType, which are the latest technology in computer-assisted typesetting. I can now use my “corporate” fonts FF Meta and FF Meta Serif from LyX — amazing! ConferencesAlthough still working on cutting down my travelling, I can’t miss some conferences this year. I managed to skip FOSDEM, which made me a bit sad, but I’ll be compensated by attending and possible some more… This year my main topics will be OpenEmbedded and freesmartphone.org — both dedicated to reducing the fragmentation of Linux-based embedded systems and to ease writing software for mobile devices running free and open source software. I hope we’ll bump into each other at one of these occasions. Stay tuned! December 27, 2008Michael Lauer: Visiting 25c3 for one day
Although traditionally the Chaos Computer Congress’ schedule is slightly suboptimal for me (12/26th is my birthday), I’m going to be in Berlin from 12/28th to 12/30th and will visit CCC on the 3th day (12/29th). I’m going to attend Harald’s talk about GSM base stations, so if you want to talk to me, just pick me up afterwards. June 12, 2008Stefan Schmidt: TechWeek in Vachdorf
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... May 22, 2008Stefan Schmidt: Talk and Radio Interview at the LinuxTag 2008
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. May 09, 2008Stefan Schmidt: SCM changes
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: http://svn.datenfreihafen.org/$PROJECT_NAME http://git.datenfreihafen.org/ May 08, 2008Stefan Schmidt: Recent OpenEZX progress
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. Stefan Schmidt: OpenMoko Framework Initiative goes live
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. December 10, 2007Stefan Schmidt: Which wifi chip drives the Spectec SDW-82{1,2,3} SDIO cards?
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 November 15, 2007Stefan Schmidt: Navilock BT-451 under linux and navit
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. :) September 03, 2007Stefan Schmidt: Catching up with OpenEZX again
It's a long time since I really spent some hours on doing OpenEZX only work. A lot great stuff happened since then:
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. Stefan Schmidt: Mobile Developer Days 2007 are over
Currently I'm with Mickey in a train back to Germany from Denmark. The last days I participated the Mobile Developer Days 2007. In contrast to the most other conferences I attend this one was not only about FOSS but more about developing software for mobile devices. Write applications in Python, Java, Open C, examples for location enabled applications, VoIP and rapid prototyping for artist are just a small extract of the program. 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. July 07, 2007Stefan Schmidt: Conferences ahead. Going to RMLL and GUADEC.
After having a busy time with university, OpenMoko and getting my partime freelance going I now are getting more relaxed and looking forward to the next two weeks which I will spend mostly on two conferences. Next week starts with my flight to France. I'm giving a talk about free software on mobile phones. It covers mostly OpenEZX and OpenMoko, but also tries to give an overview about other projects in this area. As my talk is at the first day I'm looking forward for the other talks, visit Amiens and doing having some time for OpenMoko related work. Coming back from France means having a half day and a night at home and jumping over to England again. GUADEC will be full of meeting people, having fun and making plans for the upcoming month. I'll fly together with Daniel and his girlfriend and meet up Mickey in Birmingham. But besides OpenMoko related discussions I really looking forward to meet people behind Gnome. December 04, 2006Harald Welte: My reason for being away from OpenEZX
This post should have been posted months ago, but only since very recently I'm allowed to talk about the real reason. You might have read about it, if you read my full blog, but I'm posting this again in the 'a780' category to make it appear on planet.openezx.org I've been hired to be key element in the design and implementation of the OpenMoko platform and the first device it supports: The Neo1973 phone. While there is no provision in the contract preventing me from working on the OpenEZX project at all, this assignment has just sucked up all available time like a vacuum cleaner. To OpenEZX developers, users and supporters: Please be assured that most of the work done on OpenMoko will eventually benefit OpenEZX quite a lot. So please stay tuned, and concentrate on the low-leve device-specific issues that need to be resolved with the Motorola EZX hardware :) September 15, 2006Harald Welte: A1200 LSM / SELinux update
James Morris got quite interested when I told him that the A1200 uses SELinux to lock out the users (owners!) from their own phone ;) So we both did some further analysis, and it turned out that Motorola had actually released the source code to their own policy engine (MotoAC) with the A1200 kernel sources on opensource.motorola.com, whcih is good. Still we didn't understand why you would use an unmaintained, at least three years old version of SELinux to base a forked policy engine on it - but obviously this is the world of Free Software and everybody is allowed to make his own decisions. I've also catched up with the A1200 in general and found out that people have already managed to flash their own kernel into it, whcih is great. I wish I had more time to put into OpenEZX at this point, turning it into something that is actually useful. HINT: Skilled volunteers needed. Pavel Machek apparently got one and is annoyed by the restrictive SELinux policies. By now I'm quite sure that it's not all too difficult to get rid of them ;) September 01, 2006Harald Welte: ROKR E2 Linux Phone review
There has been an extensive review of the Linux based Motorola ROKR E2 phone at osnews.com. August 29, 2006Harald Welte: Wanted: Author and/or sources for EZX "qonsole" application
The original author of the KDE "Konsole" program, Lars Doelle, is actively looking for the Author and/or the source code of the "qonsole" program, a terminal program for the Motorola EZX platform that is apparently derived from GPL licensed Konsole. Since the legal status of qonsole never was clear, I always refused to host it on any of the OpenEZX project resources. I didn't really know of any GPL violation going on, but had a somewhat strange feeling. If any of you has information on where the qonsole program originates, please make sure to inform either Lars or me about it. We know by now that it appears to originate from some chinese or singapore mobile phone forums. It's good to see more software authors of GPL licensed programs actually caring about enforcement of their license :) I sincerely hope this can be resolved and qonsole either distributed in gpl-compliant way, or a re-implementation be found/made. July 10, 2006Harald Welte: Motorola ROKR E2
I've found the ROKR E2, which is yet another Motorola Linux GSM/GPRS phone exclusively sold in china so far. Apparently since June 22nd, so it's a quite new thing. It's very different from the A7xx/E680x series in that it doesn't have a touch screen, but many more buttons. Also, it features a full-size SD card slot, which makes it theoretically SDIO compatible (I'm pretty sure they use some SDIO compatible SD host controller in there). Let's see whether I can work with the Chinese language firmware. I already found out how to get it into boot-loader flash mode (by pressing the camera button on the upper right side while powering the device up). It looks completely different than the blob on the A780/E680, but that doesn't really mean anything. As of now, I don't have any technical proof that the device runs Linux. I'll probably not find time to play with this toy before I get back to Germany. But if anyone has hints or further information on how to dig deeper into the ROKR E2, don't hesitate to send me an email about your findings. July 08, 2006Harald Welte: Motorola A728 and A732
Just next to my hotel, there is a book store that also sells mobile phones. Among the Motorola models are the A728 and A732, both Linux based. They're about 160EUR each. I don't yet know whether that is a good price, but now after checking with some online shops I think it is. So I guess I'll get one of each in order to investigate whether we can hack them from an OpenEZX point of view. Also, this finally allows me to obtain proof whether they're still shipping GPL incompliant or not. I'll continue to look for an A768 and E895. Let's see whether I'll find some time to do some more serious 'shop browsing'. June 23, 2006Harald Welte: Some small A780 progress
I've continued my work on porting the ts07.10 from Motorola's mux_cli to 2.6.x. It now compiles, although I have no idea whether it actually works as expected. Since Linux 2.5/2.6 has undergone quite some sophisticated changes in both scheduling/context area (no more struct task_queue) as well as the tty layer (dynamically allocated and managed flip buffers, etc), the task has been a bit more challenging than the usual copy+paste+minor_fixup task. I'll also be releasing the -ezx6 kernel soon (2.6.17 based) in the next couple of days, where I plan to merge mickey's various driver bits (LED, backlight, keypad fixes) and the above-mentioned mux_cli. June 12, 2006Harald Welte: Interview on OpenEZX at LWN.net
For those interested, lwn.net is featuring the first part of an interview withe me on the status of the OpenEZX project. The way longer pert of the interview on gpl-violations.org will be posted within the next two weeks. Now let's hope that I'll be able to fix that nasty netfilter bug that I'm hunting for weeks now and get back to OpenEZX kernel hacking... June 07, 2006Harald Welte: Not working on OpenEZX at the moment
Due to lots of other "real life" and "real work" constraints, I'm not able to work on OpenEZX for at least another week :( May 27, 2006Harald Welte: Porting Motorola's TS07.10 MUX driver to 2.6.x
Since Motorola has finally released the source code for the mux_cli.o and gprsv.o modules of their 2.4.17 kernel on opensource.motorola.com, I've started to clean them up and port them to 2.6.x. Due to the questionable coding style of that original source code, and the many interface changes in the TTY layer between 2.4.x and 2.6.x, this turns out to be a bigger task than expected. With some luck, I'll find some time tomorrow at ph-neutral to finish the initial port. Once that code works on 2.6.x, I already have a quite long list of TODO's. First of all, the lower-layer interface needs to be cleaned up. Ideally, the whole TS 07.10 implementation is a TTY line discipline that can be stacked on top of any UART, together with a virtual/fake UART that makes use of the Motorola specific TS07.10 USB transport. |
Rather than wasting time watching Andy Green telling us that our projects will die soon and we should all start using Fedora/Embedded now, we could have had some progress… Oh well, perhaps next year.