Re: Freerunner's Future
On Jun 11 20:20-0300, Werner Almesberger wrote: snip Even in the hardware area, there's more than just low-risk implementation projects. E.g., there should also be activities that take on the risky bits and bring them under control. Such pioneer efforts can then be integrated into the next safe design. snip I would really like to see this paradigm expanded to other types of currently-proprietary hardware. You could even rip off large parts of the current design :). As an example: An openmoko HAM radio. Commercially-produced amateur radio equipment is quite proprietary (and expensive, since it's a fairly small market). Most of them have a very limited feature set, partly because of software limitations. Since the nature of amateur radio is to promote experimentation and emergency communications, a device like the openmoko (replacing the GSM radio with hardware to handle HAM radio, SDR?; and a larger form factor) would be highly useful. To give you an idea on pricing, there is a popular (high-end) $400 handheld right now that can handle 2 receive channels, bluetooth (w/$70 add-on board), gps (w/$70 gps receiver add-on for you to accidentally break off the top), APRS messaging (easily handled by a PIC microcontroller... imagine what a real processor could do), and a 1.3x.8 dot matrix display. -- Eldon Koyle -- BOFH excuse #185: system consumed all the paper for paging ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: IRC conversation with Mirko from the Paroli team
On Mar 13 21:30+1300, Robin Paulson wrote: snip true, but they can't have it both ways. if they say, 'we want input from the community' on something or other, the likelihood of disagreement/flames/arguments etc. goes up. then they either can snip They don't ask for input from the community on everything, though. I was merely trying to point out that there shouldn't be any expectation of them telling 'the community' what they are going to do before they do anything. Obviously they should still communicate with any significant contributors about anything they are doing that will affect said contributors -- but there is no reason to try to communicate it to the whole community; and it would be ridiculous to expect all of these communications to be public. -- Eldon Koyle ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: IRC conversation with Mirko from the Paroli team
rant Openmoko (the company) doesn't have any responsibility to be open to the community. I personally do appreciate when they are, but I can see why they might want to be a little more closed. I think a lot of time is spent arguing with community members over things that aren't extremely important in the long-term. When it comes right down to it, there is no reason for them to tell us everything that is going on. Let them make their design decisions so that they can make better use of their time in accomplishing their goals, whatever they may be. Chances are you won't agree with some of their design goals. They can't please everyone, so they shouldn't try to. The beauty of open source is that you can change it however you want. If you disagree strongly enough, you make a fork or write something yourself. Companies involved in open source projects aren't involved solely for the sake of open source (although they are usually very good contributors). They have goals they are trying to accomplish -- like finally getting a usable software stack for a phone. They also have to make money somewhere. If by saving the effort of communicating with everyone who thinks it should be their business is allowing them to spend more time making a usable set of applications, more power to them. They are still giving you the source, and if you don't like something I'm sure patches are quite welcome. Look at what happens every time a hardware-related (ie. gta03) post occurs on this list: there is a very strong split between people who want mutually-exclusive features, followed by a lot of arguing about which is better, when it really comes down to a matter of preference (the resistive vs. capacitive argument reminds me a lot of the stereotypical vim vs. emacs comparison which is guaranteed to start a flamewar on any LUG mailing list). /rant -- Eldon Koyle ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: GPRS unreliable: long lasting connection fail
On Jan 13 12:25-0700, Eldon Koyle wrote:
I was looking at this once and I think the problem might be that pppd
closes the device and re-opens it before reconnecting, and the mux
device is no longer usable once it has been closed.
I didn't verify this, but it seemed logical to me ;).
I decided to take another look, and here is what happens:
If you have the 'persist' option in /etc/ppp/peers/connection name,
pppd will reconnect after errors. To reconnect, it closes the device then
reopens it. With gsm0710muxd, when /dev/pts/N gets closed it is
deallocated. Then, pppd is trying to reconnect to a device that doesn't
exist.
A hack-around for this might be to turn off the 'persist' option and make a
script like:
identvar=$(date +%s)
while true; do
# code ripped of from somewhere to get a mux device
ptsvar=$(dbus-send --system --print-reply --type=method_call
--dest=org.pyneo.muxer /org/pyneo/Muxer org.freesmartphone.GSM.MUX.AllocChannel
string:$identvar | grep string | awk -F '' '{ print $2 }')
[ -z $ptsvar ] exit 1
logger -s gprsd.sh[$$]: starting pppd using $ptsvar
pppd $ptsvar 115200 call connection name nodetach
logger -s gprsd.sh[$$]: connection closed, waiting 10 seconds
sleep 10
done
--
Eldon Koyle
--
Treaties are like roses and young girls -- they last while they last.
-- Charles DeGaulle
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Re: GPRS unreliable: long lasting connection fail
I was looking at this once and I think the problem might be that pppd closes the device and re-opens it before reconnecting, and the mux device is no longer usable once it has been closed. I didn't verify this, but it seemed logical to me ;). -- Eldon Koyle -- BOFH excuse #153: Big to little endian conversion error On Jan 12 22:14+1300, Andrew Stephen wrote: On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 9:39 PM, Niccolo Rigacci nicc...@rigacci.org wrote: [snip] Please tell me: with gsm0710uxd the connection is still done by pppd/chat? Yes - gsm0710muxd creates a new serial device for each application needing access to the GSM device. You just call pppd with its own device. [snip] I hope to last 12 hours or so, because I do GPS live tracking with position upload to the internet every 5/10 seconds. [snip] I've run GPRS for several hours at a time in a car travelling in some dodgy reception areas. Sometimes it seemsed to lose connection and re-establish itself gracefully but more often than not I'd find that GPRS had died and pppd was still up but ineffective. I usually had to reboot the FR before I could re-establish connection when this happened. -- Andrew Stephen http://www.evil.geek.nz/ It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. - Oscar Wilde ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Openmoko keyboard mockup
On Jan 06 16:59+0100, kimaidou wrote: Hi Kieran, +1 for your idea : a toggle fullscreen button would be a great improvement. I still consider a transparent keyboard will be a good stuff too. By transparent, I don't mean you can click on the interface under , I mean you can see what you are writting under the keyboard, but cannot have an action on the things under. With you toggle fullscreen button, the transparent keyboard would be an improvement. snip A 'transparent' keyboard would have a high 'coolness' factor, but I think it would be hard to really see what you are typing (not to mention the technical limitations pointed out by rasterman). Maybe it would be better to have a full-screen input mode where you can see what will be typed (maybe keep the rightmost 20-30 characters of the string visible in the keyboard app, then actually pass it to the program when leaving 'full-screen' mode or pressing 'enter', etc). That still allows you to see what you are typing with a full-screen keyboard (which is what it seems most people are wanting from the transparency). Extra points could be awarded for allowing applications to give the keyboard app a description of the 'active' field to be displayed in a 'full-screen' mode. -- Eldon Koyle -- The graveyards are full of indispensable men. -- Charles de Gaulle ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
gsm0710muxd and OM 2008.12
I just spent a while tracking down an issue with 2008.12 and gsm0710muxd. I upgraded an FDOM image, so I'm not sure if anyone else will see this problem, but just in case I thought I'd send this to the list. 2008.12 was starting xserver-nodm before gsm0710muxd, so the dbus call added in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/89qtopia started a separate gsm0710muxd process without any args before gsm0710muxd was started by init which caused gsm0710muxd to fail to work. A quick fix is to change xserver-nodm from S04 to S23 (gsm0710muxd is 22) or so in /etc/rc5.d . -- Eldon Koyle -- Between grand theft and a legal fee, there only stands a law degree. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Call for mirrors for FDOM
Are the files available via rsync? If so, it would be trivial for me to add it to our mirror. I'm lazy, so I'd rather not write new scripts ;). -- Eldon Koyle -- Those who do not do politics will be done in by politics. -- French Proverb On Oct 24 19:53+0200, David Samblas wrote: Well some of you have send me a mail about my site is little bit slow ... taking in count I have served about 20Gb in less than 2 days is with peaks of 1 Gb/hour , slow is at least a good performance :) I will try to make a script to balance beetween me an the mirrors but actually there is only one updated http://files.tdobson.net/openmoko/freerunner/fdom/ thanks Tim :) Thanks to you all for your support :) Regards -- David Reyes Samblas Martinez http://www.tuxbrain.com Open ultraportable solutions Hey, watch out!!! There's a linux in your pocket!!! ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
