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See Getting Started with your Neo FreeRunner
First place to check is this FAQ.
If your question isn't answered here, you should search the archives of the community or support mailing lists
Next, try a larger Google search.
If you still haven't found the answer to your question, post it on the appropriate list, community or support.
Provide detailed information about what you are trying to find out, and use the Subject line to summarize your question. More tips to asking effective questions can be found [[1]]
If your question requires confidentiality, you are welcome to contact Michael Shiloh directly.
You might also look for local Openmoko users to find some local support. A few minutes with a live person might solve a simple misunderstanding that would take hours to understand via email. (If a local club doesn't exist, this might be the perfect opportunity to start one!)
Send mail to michael@openmoko.org or to steve@openmoko.com
Right here.
Openmoko is two things:
Openmoko is a Linux distribution designed for open mobile computing platforms, such as, but not limited to, cellphones.
Openmoko is the company behind the Openmoko Linux distribution. Openmoko also manufactures mobile computing platforms, such as the Neo FreeRunner.
By providing a completely open source Linux distribution, and by opening the schematics and CAD files, Openmoko's goal is to nurture explosive innovation (such as occurred with the Personal Computer) in the field of connected mobile computing, cellphones, and ubiquitous computing.
Join one or more of the mailing lists. A great place to start is the community list.
Browse the wiki, and help improve it.
Start or join an [Openmoko project].
Start or join a local group near you.
Absolutely. If you're a visual artist, you can help us with icons and other visuals. Musicians can help contribute ringtones and other sounds. Marketing? Sales? Information visualization? Join the community mailing lists, introduce yourself, and you'll soon find a place to put your skills to good use.
The Neo FreeRunner is an open cellphone designed for the Openmoko Linux distribution. By open we mean that (a) all chips have been chosen to allow their drivers to be completely open sourced and (b) the schematics and the plastic (CAD) files are available as well.
For more details, see Neo FreeRunner specifications
The Neo FreeRunner is designed for everyday use by end users and for continued software development and improvements by the Openmoko team and the Openmoko community.
The Openmoko software is not yet ready for everyday use.
The question is almost what can you NOT do with this phone - eventually there will be a huge range of free software applications allowing both end users and developers to get much more out of this phone than a standard "locked" mobile phone using features like the integrated GPS, bluetooth, wifi and accelerometers.
There are two buttons on the Neo FreeRunner: One just below the USB socket, and one on the other side, near the top. Both buttons are clear, and both have LEDs behind them.
All buttons and LEDs are software-controlled; that is, their behavior depends on what the installed software implements.
See here for more details, along with some programs which implement a variety of behaviors.
In a conventional closed phone, the handset maker and the mobile network operator work together to provide a service to you that best suits their business model. The capabilities of a modern smartphone equipped with GPS, Wifi and bluetooth are amazing yet unfortunately inaccessible: many features are "locked down" because they do not suit the network operator. Up until now it has been difficult to buy a phone on which you have freedom to install sofware which is not controlled by the network operators - Openmoko changes that!
A list of examples of "closed" behaviour has been started here - Problems of typical "closed" phones
Please join one of the mailing lists to follow and participate in this discussion.
http://www.openmoko.com. We sell both directly and through a growing list of distributors.
If you buy directly from the Openmoko webshop you will pay USD $399 for the Neo FreeRunner, USD $99 for the debug board. You can also purchase boxes of 10 FreeRunners at a price of USD $369 each. If you don't have a need for 10 units, you can join an existing or form a new group at Group_sales.
With the Neo FreeRunner and NO debug board you can do:
With a debug board you can additionally do:
In summary, it is rare for a Neo FreeRunner user to require a debug board.
To emphasize, the debug board is not required in order to develop applications, system software, or even kernel or device drivers. The debug board is not required in order to gain access to the source code or the development tools.
Visit openmoko.com
Search for the line that says "Revision". There will be 4 digits, of the form "0350". The '5' in this example indicates hardware revision 5.
Issues relating to software are in the "known issues" section for each distribution. Navigate there via the distributions page - Distributions.
Issues relating to firmware and hardware are in Neo FreeRunner Hardware Issues.
Note that some issues might involve a combination of hardware and software.
Some selected known issues that are commonly encountered and reported on mailing lists are described below.
Please see some SIMs don't work.
Here is how to check: follow Manually_using_GSM until you get an OK prompt.
For more detailed documentation, please refer to FreeRunner_unable_to_work_with_3G_SIM_cards and Carriers.
The GSM firmware update is applicable only to the Neo 1973. Any fixes in the update are already implemented in the GSM firmware in the Neo FreeRunner.
See Can't boot with discharged or missing battery.
In brief, you need to boot the phone into the NAND or NOR u-boot menu before dfu-util will be able to connect. dfu-util uses the USB DFU (Universal Serial Bus Device Firmware Upgrade) protocol, which is only available at the u-boot menu, and not Ethernet over USB, which is what is available when the phone has booted fully.
Tip: If you're just trying out different distributions, you don't need to flash them with dfu-util; you can try out new distributions by putting them on the microSD card and booting from the card instead. If you'd like to do this instead of flashing, see Booting from SD.
To get the u-boot menu:
Also see the wiki pages/sections:
See this issue on the FreeRunner Hardware Issues page
See this issue on the FreeRunner Hardware Issues page. See ticket #1802.
See here
See Neo FreeRunner (GTA02) Battery#Notes_about_expected_battery_life and more battery information in Neo_FreeRunner_(GTA02)_Battery
The Neo FreeRunner can not charge when turned off.
The Neo FreeRunner can charge when suspended.
See here
The FreeRunner has the following connectivity options:
The following pages contain very useful information:
See GTA02 GPS
See GPS Problems.
..TBA..
Yes - see this howto for how to configure a linux computer to act as such a router and Bluetooth Support.
This requires an adapter Mini-B 5-pole => Type A jack or an adapter jack => jack. See USB host for more information.
This question is equivalent to How to connect two [Unix/Linux] computers via USB cable and what sort of special cable is needed? -> http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/connecting-two-computers-with-a-usb-cable-data-cable-411073
It should work if one Neo is set to Host mode and the other one set to Device mode. One Neo could give power to the USB-port it the other Neo's battery is low. (I have to verify this)
Run: echo "host" > /sys/devices/platform/s3c2410-ohci/usb_mode echo "1" > /sys/devices/platform/neo1973-pm-host.0/hostmode
These commands will put the FreeRunner into powered USB host mode. After this, just plug in the keyboard and it'll work. Personally, I've made a .desktop file to switch into and out of host mode.
To switch back to unpowered device mode just run:
echo "device" > /sys/devices/platform/s3c2410-ohci/usb_mode echo "0" > /sys/devices/platform/neo1973-pm-host.0/hostmode
Finally you will need a USB Type A Female to Female adapter. For more details see here
The above does not work with QtExtended on mwester's kernel, it gives an invalid argument on the first command.
No, it can do about 20 fps QVGA with software, and something beetween QVGA and VGA playing MPEG-4 using hardware (at resonable fps). Scaling is also done with GPU hardware.
NOTE: This probably differs for each distribution? Need to insert, or link to, relevant info for each. --eddsouza 09:29, 7 September 2008 (UTC) |
Look at Today/2007.2#Adjust_UI_components_at_runtime.
See here
To simplify extending the hardware, various signals of interest are brought out via the JTAG connector and can be easily accessed with the debug board:
(TBA: List of signals)
Some additional signals that did not fit on the JTAG connector are brought out to solder pads:
(TBA: List of signals)
Yes
See GTA02_sysfs
There has been some discussion of this on the mailing list. There is motivation, and there are interested developers. Not being a Mac OS X user, I don't know enough to summarize the discussion to answer this question. Can someone please fill in?
For IP over USB cable connectivity, it is planned to improve/adapt the AJZaurusUSB driver, allowing ssh into the Openmoko.
It is expected that (Bluetooth/UB) SyncML based interoperation for contacts and events can easily be achieved by a patch to the Apple iSync configuration tables.
There is an open source implementation of Cocoa (GNUstep) that aims to run MacOS X compatible applications (sort of PPC/x86/ARM universal binaries) on Openmoko devices: mySTEP.
Yes. All software that runs on the main CPU and can be updated by the user is available in source.
Firmware in "black box" hardware modules that can not be modified by users is not available in source form. Effectively, these modules are "hardware only".
This allows, for example, that the driver for the GSM module be completely open sourced without violating any FCC rules.
Reviews of the latest "bleeding edge" daily builds of the Openmoko software stack can be seen here
At the moment, the answer to many other questions is "no". The phone is at the moment a small Linux box with a touchscreen, a working dialer and some prototype apps. Most do not function in any way that would be suitable for end-users. If you want to add a feature or application request, then look over the existing Applications and either add one, or add a feature request to the applications page.
You can run it on your PC. You may be able to run it on other mobile platforms
I think a lot of work must still be done, but this wiki page has some information
The 2007.2 distribution - see 2007.2 factory default software image
Yes, see 2007.2 Known Issues
See Flashing the Neo FreeRunner
See Distributions
You can run the commands given below on the phone (in an SSH session from your host PC, or in the Terminal application on the phone itself)
To find out | Run |
---|---|
Kernel version that is currently running |
uname -a |
The version of the root filesystem that you are currently using |
cat /etc/version or cat /etc/om-version |
The versions of u-boot on the phone (The FreeRunner has one u-boot image in NOR memory, and one in NAND - see Booting the Neo FreeRunner for more information) |
grep Bootloader /dev/mtdblock0 (yields the NOR u-boot version) or grep Bootloader /dev/mtdblock1 (yields the NAND u-boot version) |
There is no GTK engine or theme installed with the ASU build. Fortunately, this is easy to fix!
At a terminal:
Now you have pretty colors and widgets, but the font is too big. Edit /usr/share/themes/Moko/gtk-2.0/gtkrc in your favorite text editor and add the following line:
To use the openmoko icon theme, install it with:
and enable it editing the /usr/share/themes/Moko/gtk-2.0/gtkrc adding the line:
You shouldn't even need to restart the device, although you will need to restart any GTK-based programs.
Since the Neo FreeRunner can boot from the micro SD card, you can install and boot from as many distributions as will fit on your card. See Booting from SD.
Replace the matchbox-wm line in zhone-session with xfwm4 to start the xfce-wm.
Here's my (Fox Mulder) /usr/bin/zhone-session file which works with xfwm and matchbox keyboard popup:
#!/bin/sh #zhone & exec startxfce4 & matchbox-keyboard-toggle & #exec matchbox-window-manager -use_titlebar yes exec xfwm4
At the moment, almost no 'end-user' applications are present and working in a usable state. It is possible to make and receive calls in some software revisions, this frequently breaks though.
Pretty much any that can be cross-compiled for the ARM architecture.
Since it has WiFi the FreeRunner should be a good platform for VOIP use.
In either case please check for softphone apps ported to the Openmoko distribution at the projects page. We need to focus efforts on free software. Not convincing non-free software companies to release binaries for our Neos.
There many Open Source IM clients, many of which have a plugin architecture and so support the use of more than one IM protocol, even simultaneously. One example is Pidgin, formerly called GAIM. GPRS does induce a certain amount of latency but that should not be a problem for simple, text-oriented chat between parties. And the GTA02's WiFi will make it even better.
You don't really need Flash to watch YouTube videos, for example, if you want to watch www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9QLdK6pFCI just install mplayer and use this command:
mplayer http://ytpocket.com/getflv.php?id=k9QLdK6pFCI
or use this small script with the video URL as the first parametre:
#!/bin/sh vid=`echo "$1" | sed 's/.*\?.*=\(.*\)/\1/'` mplayer http://ytpocket.com/getflv.php?id=$vid
See here
See here
See here
It's possible now, see The opkg autocompletion
See Toolchain.
For a lot of testing and development work you can simply run Openmoko directly on your PC.
QEMU can emulate the Neo 1973 and the Neo FreeRunner. The MokoMakefile has support for automatically building, flashing, and running the Neo emulator.
See Qemu for more advanced information on running Openmoko in Qemu.
Xoo. Koen says: "Xoo should be enough for most applications people will develop, since most don't need access to the GSM uart directly. If you're hardcore you could use qemu + xoo, but that still doesn't emulate all the hardware quirks (e.g. unaligned access)".
Update: Stefan Schmidt has resized the Neo1973 Mock-up and written a small description for xoo. In his words:
It's not really usable at all, as you need a really high screen resolution to fit the whole picture on your screen. And of course the dpi are wrong. Even no buttons because I can't remember where they are at the case.
http://www.datenfreihafen.org/~stefan/OpenMoko/neo1973-xoo-device.tar.bz2
Start with 'xoo --device /path/to/neo1973.xml'
Some more details here.
Or use Xephyr directly with locally compiled programs (e.g. matchbox svn + openmoko):
Xephyr -screen 480x640 -nolisten tcp -ac :1 & export DISPLAY=:1 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib matchbox-window-manager -display $DISPLAY -use_titlebar no \ -use_super_modal yes -use_lowlight yes -use_dialog_mode static \ -use_cursor yes & matchbox-panel --geometry=480x44 --end-applets=clock & openmoko-footer & openmoko-taskmanager &
This should get you started:
Making legacy apps written for the "Garnet" OS (née "Palm OS") run on Linux is decidedly non-trivial.
PalmOS apps are in general very hard to simply 'port'. Particularly well-designed programs may make it possible.
The ACCESS Linux Platform will include Garnet on Host (GHost), a PalmOS emulator that will support M6800 (68k) and ARM PalmOS applications. This part (GarnetVM and the .prc loader) will however be closed-source and likely under a restrictive license (fact confirmed by ACCESS Co. employees), making it rather unusable. In addition GarnetVM depends on Hiker and other packages.
It is possible that POSE, an emulator that simulates a Palm device on a Linux host could be used to allow 68k based applications to run. This emulator has been around a long time; one expects that it will also run on Openmoko, but this has to be considered a short-term bandaid rather than a long-term solution.
Hopefully emulation will be necessary only for M68000 code (pre-PalmOS 5) while native ARM programs can run natively under Linux, provided a proper set of PalmOS libraries and a .prc executable loader.
It will have eventually, if you help us to get it working. Some good places to keep track of would be projects.openmoko.org and PhoneME.
Project [Jalimo] is a project aiming to provide a Java stack on mobile devices. There is a port of Jalimo for Openmoko. The Debian distribution supports CacaoVM and JamVM through apt-get. See Java for more infos.
For Ruby 1.9, please refer to http://blog.sparkymat.net/2008/08/10/ruby-19-on-openmoko/
For Ruby 1.8.6, please refer to http://blog.wolfman.com/articles/2008/08/10/ruby-1-8-6-on-openmoko-freerunner
Yes, with some caveats. See Python for more information.
Run the command xdpyinfo. Generally, you would do this via an SSH session to the phone, so you may need to first
export DISPLAY=":0.0"
and then run
xdpyinfo
For an example invocation, see xdpyinfo output.
NOTE: Suggestion: this should be split off into a separate page, since many of the questions below aren't really overview-level but specialized; a question like "How do I customize a distribution?" could be added to the Software - Distributions part, linking to the new page. --eddsouza 07:35, 7 September 2008 (UTC) |
After you source the Openmoko toolchain variables, the Openmoko processor compiler becomes the default compiler. You can compile any GNU - like project just typing ./configure --host i686 and then make - it will produce libraries and executables as expected. Just these executables will not run on your i686 host - they will run on Openmoko ARM processor. Use scp to upload the executables to your phone.
./build/tmp/deploy/glibc/ipk/
./build/tmp/deploy/glibc/images/fic-gta01/
The Openmoko project tree contains the folder 'data' where you can put any 128*128 icon. You need to mention the icon in two places in this folder:
Please reply UNDER post.
By searching the mailing list archives. For example, using Google searches:
site:openmoko.org text
For example, to search for accelerometer:
site:openmoko.org accelerometer
If you only want to read the "official" mails from FIC people or from Openmoko people:
site:openmoko.org text "at fic.com.tw" site:openmoko.org text "at openmoko.org"
For example to search for "release date" from FIC people:
site:openmoko.org "release date" "at fic.com.tw"
Alternatively you can use the custom Openmoko search engine that is using Google Co-op.
The answer for the display used in GTA01 and GTA02 is '2'
See this wiki's statistics page.
The Neo1973 was last available in Febuary 2008.
See page Neo1973_Hardware and category Neo1973 Hardware and Disassembling Neo1973
Use provided keyboard app.
Use Bluetooth keyboard.
For more methods and ideas see Wishlist:Text_Input.
Yes, audio path from GSM to/from mic and speakers is completely controllable by user. For example recording calls (both sides) and implementing an Answering Machine is possible. Also using text->speech should be possible or modifying outgoing voice. Currently there is no software bundled in phone to do this. There are only 2 A/D inputs and three D/A outputs (one dedicated to the earpiece). This means that stereo audio playback cannot happen at the same time as the Answering Machine functionality, amongst other things. See the audio page. Neo1973 Audio Subsystem
There has been no word on this so far, but see these estimates for a rough idea. More information about the battery here.
Charge the phone, communicate with it over USB-serial, or USB-networking.
Plug external devices, such as wifi, cameras, or mass-storage devices.
The only limitation on current hardware seems to be no usb 2.0 support, which means slower communication with 2.0 devices.
The processor has USB 1.1 built in. One with USB2 built in would have been more expensive, and might not be open.
The FreeRunner has the same processor as the Neo1973.
The Neo will have mini-USB-B, and will be able to function as either a host or a device. It will NOT be USB On-The-Go. OTG is a complex specification, and it comprises way more than just an AB socket, but also electrical and software components which cannot be provide by the S3C2410.
You will need a special Mini-B to regular-B cable (note that this won't actually comply with the USB standard: a compliant cable has to have an A or Mini-A plug on one end, and B or Mini-B on the other).