Community Updates/2009-01-12

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Sean's new year interview.

Contents

Distributions

New applications

  •  LED clock When an Openmoko is sitting unused at night, turn it into an alarm clock with large 7-segment digits on a black background in landscape mode.
  • GPRSsettings is a GUI script designed to change apn, login, dialnumber.
  • Samuel's script for a toggle wifi icon.
  • ylock 0.1 Python screen lock and low battery monits.
  • AppManager 1.0.1 Zenity package manager.

Ports and update

  • Lots of Navit activity. Distributions are kindly suggested to package the sample map separately from the main binary to conserve space.
  • The opkg package manager development moved from OM svn to Google code. The recommended stable version is r172, there is a significant data structures+algorithm refactorization going on.
  • Version 2.4 of orrery is now available. It has a new schematic Solar System View page, showing the position of the planets and our moon in their orbits, a new moon calendar, and a less ugly icon.
  • You can now add/remove/edit repositories (i.e. feeds) in ZOMG! package manager.

Community

  • Sean's new year interview
  • Rakshat Hooja's company IDA Systems will be at Mumbai's TechFest. There are gifts waiting for the first 10 FreeRunner owners to show up at their boot!
  • The Future of location services thread started as an attempt to clarify the GPS drivers tangle, and then turned to using GSM celltowers and wifi access points location information. Dima signalled that there are several free databases of GSM tower locations, and that his gta02 Perl script to query OpenCellID for the approximate tower location, and then initialize the AGPS with this data works great. There is a database of Wifi access points at wigle.net.

Hardware and drivers

  • Werner announced he made an internal debug board. This is contributed as a community member, not as Openmoko employee.
  • Filter key bouncing patches.
  • There is a thread about the touchscreen driver on the devel list, how it should be split between kernelspace and userspace, and how to contribute it upstream to the Linux kernel. I find the mix of high-level technical arguments with social and emotional considerations fascinating.
  • Illume's keyboard is definitely now The keyboard. It is a pleasure to say that the Community localized it already to at least nine different languages. This does not only involves layout and icon, but also building up a dictionary. The frontier: input for asian languages.
  • The Freeunner is also a target platform for many innovative new input methods.

Tips and tricks

  • Booting 2008.12 from a microsd fails with "Only GTA01 hardware supported by ASoc driver" ? Option "ro" on the kernel commandline is fatal for startup of 2008.12. Check your U-Boot env if you're using that for "ro", or try adding rw to /boot/append-GTA02 if you are on SD Card and Qi.
Personal tools

Sean's new year interview.

Distributions

New applications

  •  LED clock When an Openmoko is sitting unused at night, turn it into an alarm clock with large 7-segment digits on a black background in landscape mode.
  • GPRSsettings is a GUI script designed to change apn, login, dialnumber.
  • Samuel's script for a toggle wifi icon.
  • ylock 0.1 Python screen lock and low battery monits.
  • AppManager 1.0.1 Zenity package manager.

Ports and update

  • Lots of Navit activity. Distributions are kindly suggested to package the sample map separately from the main binary to conserve space.
  • The opkg package manager development moved from OM svn to Google code. The recommended stable version is r172, there is a significant data structures+algorithm refactorization going on.
  • Version 2.4 of orrery is now available. It has a new schematic Solar System View page, showing the position of the planets and our moon in their orbits, a new moon calendar, and a less ugly icon.
  • You can now add/remove/edit repositories (i.e. feeds) in ZOMG! package manager.

Community

  • Sean's new year interview
  • Rakshat Hooja's company IDA Systems will be at Mumbai's TechFest. There are gifts waiting for the first 10 FreeRunner owners to show up at their boot!
  • The Future of location services thread started as an attempt to clarify the GPS drivers tangle, and then turned to using GSM celltowers and wifi access points location information. Dima signalled that there are several free databases of GSM tower locations, and that his gta02 Perl script to query OpenCellID for the approximate tower location, and then initialize the AGPS with this data works great. There is a database of Wifi access points at wigle.net.

Hardware and drivers

  • Werner announced he made an internal debug board. This is contributed as a community member, not as Openmoko employee.
  • Filter key bouncing patches.
  • There is a thread about the touchscreen driver on the devel list, how it should be split between kernelspace and userspace, and how to contribute it upstream to the Linux kernel. I find the mix of high-level technical arguments with social and emotional considerations fascinating.
  • Illume's keyboard is definitely now The keyboard. It is a pleasure to say that the Community localized it already to at least nine different languages. This does not only involves layout and icon, but also building up a dictionary. The frontier: input for asian languages.
  • The Freeunner is also a target platform for many innovative new input methods.

Tips and tricks

  • Booting 2008.12 from a microsd fails with "Only GTA01 hardware supported by ASoc driver" ? Option "ro" on the kernel commandline is fatal for startup of 2008.12. Check your U-Boot env if you're using that for "ro", or try adding rw to /boot/append-GTA02 if you are on SD Card and Qi.