February 08, 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 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. 
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.
Returning home now — sitting in the EasyJet plane somewhere over Germany and sipping coffee.
Tenth FOSDEM is past now. We had a stand as usual but this year it looked much better then ever: white sheet, less cables floating everywhere (one central power extender with 8 sockets helps), interesting devices on table… We had:
- EVBeagle (German Beagleboard clone with blue PCB)
- 2 BUGs showing different things (camera view on mine, dual screen X11 on Denis one)
- Ulf bring new Atmel AT91SAM9M10 board (more on it in next days as it is in my bag above my head), there was also raffle in which other one was a price
- Archos 7 media player
- Psion netbook (with ‘Prototype’ text on it)
- Openmoko Freerunner
- HTC Dream (running OpenEmbedded distro instead of Android)
- FriendlyARM with WVGA screen
- Toshiba topas
- Atmel NGW100 which uses AVR32 cpu
- and some more which I forgot about
For next year it would be great to have power supply which would provide several +5V and +12V cables so there would be less plugs in use. Someone wants to donate such one? We probably need to think about creating kind of ’standard stand stuff box’ which would be used on next events so no more grabbing power extenders, USB cables etc. This is a thing to discuss.
At stand there were many people asking different questions. Some thought that we are selling hardware, some known already what OE is.
But FOSDEM was not only OE stand. This year I decided that there are talks which I want to attend and did that. I saw (titles are not original ones):
- ‘20 minutes about Openmoko history’ by Mickeyl Lauer. I got there a bit late to check did he mentioned ’super secret project’ name
- ‘Freesmartphone.org — what it is and why it is cool’ also by Mickeyl. He shown few of his DBus related tools — I need to package them for Maemo5 as they should be useful. Talk was interesting and worth being there.
- ‘Cross building systems: who we are and what our plans are’ panel was set of presentations from Ptxdist, OpenWRT, Crosstool NG, Buildroot, OpenEmbedded, cegcc projects. Everybody said that we need to share patches and help people to fix their software.
- ‘Maemo Community Counsil: who, why, what for’ was nice talk by Dave Neary (sorry man, that we did not met for talk). MCC is between community and Nokia and they do good job.
- ‘How to be good upstream’ by Gentoo developer was interesting as they have similar problems that we have in OE.
- ‘MINIX 3: system which do not want to die’ was the best entertainment during whole trip. Author was blaming Linux for being terrible buggy while his ‘baby’ was nearly bug free. But maybe because of very small user base? Not that I have something against microkernel idea — I used AmigaOS which chosen that way and know how it works.
Met some people, some planned to but time was too short as usual… Some of new faces were nice surprise: Martin Guy (the only one who understand Cirrus Logic EP93xx FPU hardware bugs) or Bluelighting from OPIE project. Tias (author of XInput calibrator tool for making touchscreens work as they should) hunted me during whole event and finally we had occasion to discuss about changes which he did due to my suggestions or problems. I shown BUG with two screens for him and he understood why I need device parameter. And next year I need to catch one guy from staff and talk with him as this year again he told that he know me and I do not know him (something like that anyway).
There was one change when it comes to stands — this year we were not next to PostgreSQL because MariaDB was between. I hope that next year we will be still nearby as I got used to the youngest person in their team :)
Speaking about future: it was last year with Astrid for me. It is in nice location (direct bus to FOSDEM place, near to Delirium Cafe) but no free wifi available in XXI century starts to be an issue. And no more going to tourist area for dinner — it was too costly I think.
Now I am in a bus which is my last way of transport today. plan to be at home before midnight. Post has to wait for Monday.
All rights reserved
© Marcin Juszkiewicz
FOSDEM X was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website
Related posts:
- FOSDEM 2007
- GUADEC continued
- Free Your Phone
February 05, 2010
I'll be there.
In recent news, the Symbian Foundation announced that "All 108 packages
containing the source code of the Symbian platform can now be downloaded from
Symbian's developer web site". This is great news!
This morning I tried to look at the parts most interesting to me: phonesrv
(implementing call engine, cell broadcast and SIM toolkit APIs) and poc
(implementing push-to-talk). Their pages don't have the usual "source code"
tab at the bottom right which links to mercurial and tarball download pages!
Either I'm too stupid, or I am unable to find any source code for those two
components. I'm quite sure something essential like the API's for making phone
calls are considered part of the Symbian platform. So how does that match
with the statement that all packages containing the Symbian platform can now
be downloaded?
February 04, 2010
Fidèle au rendez-vous, voici le billet mensuel du mois de janvier 2010.
Les bonnes causes ayant besoin de vous ne manquent pas (surtout en ce moment), mais dans la mokosphère nous avons aussi les nôtres.
Alors si le blabla habituel ne vous intéresse pas, je vous invite à lire directement le bilan tout en bas.
Actualités
Voici une sélection d'informations glanées sur la toile :
Consultez également les dernières pages Community Updates (14/01 et 28/01) pour plus d'informations, notamment sur les nombreuses application nouvelles ou mises à jour.
En janvier, ce sont 8 billets qui ont été publiés, dont les traditionnels voeux pour la nouvelle année.
Il y avait 2 événements à ne pas manquer : la conférence de Richard Stallman ainsi que la rencontre Openmoko à la Cantine.
Enfin quelques actualités : le navigateur Dooble sous Openmoko, le WikiReader devient francophone (interface et contenu), des nouvelles du QtLabs et une baisse des prix chez Bearstech.
Le forum a dépassé les 13000 messages dans plus de 1100 discussions.
J'ai apporté quelques modifications :
- création d'un forum dédié au Wikireader dans la section Projets
- modification de l'ordre d'affichage des discussions (par date de création)
Vous pouvez donner votre avis sur ces changements en quelques clics grâce à ce petit sondage.
Nous avons 13 nouveaux inscrits ce mois-ci, dont : thevegeta, vrittis, Noussa85 et cm-t.
Bienvenue à tous !
Comme d'habitude, voici une sélection non-exhaustive des discussions du mois.
Communauté :
Logiciels :
Matériels :
Projets :
Divers :
Il n'y a eu que très peu d'activité du côté du wiki et aucune nouvelle page .
Cependant, les pages suivantes ont été mises à jour :
Et enfin le Sondage sur les modifications du forum évoquées plus haut.
Statistiques du site
- Graphique des visites :
(la progression se poursuit tranquillement depuis novembre)
- Nombre de visites par mois :
(3006 visites par jour en moyenne : un record !)
(Cliquez sur l'image pour l'agrandir)
- Répartition par pays :
(La part de la France est revenue à 50% après des mois aux alentours de 40%)
- Statistiques du forum :
(plus de 13000 messages !)
- Les statistiques du wiki :
(peu d'évolutions)
Bilan
Sans rentrer dans les détails techniques, les améliorations sous le capot (évoquées dans "Actualités") paraissent enthousiasmantes.
Mais il faudra encore être patients avant qu'elles ne soient intégrées et stabilisée dans nos distributions préférées.
Je voudrais également revenir sur l'appel au soutien de FSO relayé ici ou ailleurs.
Concrètement, ils ont besoin (au moins) :
- de développeurs
- de testeurs
- d'argent
- de reconnaissance
Explications :
Comme tous les middlewares, FSO souffre d'un manque de visibilité.
Souvent, les développeurs s'intéressent à la partie émergé de l'iceberg : les applications destinées à l'utilisateur final.
Mais pas tous heureusement.
Michael Lauer a initié le le projet FreeSmartphone.org justement pour leur simplifier la vie en créant une interface qui fournirait des services aux applications et se chargerait de gérer toute la partie bas niveau en-dessous.
Ainsi, quand FSO s'améliore, ce sont toutes les applications au-dessus qui progressent !
Ce projet était soutenu par Openmoko Inc jusqu'en mars 2009.
Depuis, l'équipe a poursuivi ses travaux bénévolement avec des résultats prometteurs tout au long de l'année 2009.
L'efficacité du concept ayant été prouvée, l'objectif de 2010 est d'optimiser les temps d'exécution en traduisant le code en Vala.
Mais pour cela, ils ont besoin de nous.
Le mieux est de contribuer activement.
Mais si -comme moi- vous n'êtes pas développeur (ou que vous n'avez pas le temps), alors -comme moi- vous pouvez certainement donner quelques euros via paypal ou par virement comme expliqué sur www.freesmartphone.org.
Par ailleurs, vous pouvez signaler sur ohloh.net si vous êtes contributeurs ou utilisateurs de FSO.
Faites un geste, c'est mérité.
Hello hackable:1 users !
Serdar Dere, from #openmoko-cdevel managed to get a devroom at this year's fosdem for the openmoko community !
First things first, huge thanks to him.
Second, we get the room on Sunday morning and the schedule is
here. As you can see, it is full of talks and hackable:1 has a slot.
Meet you there ! Who's coming ?
February 03, 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, 2010
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:
- devtmpfs — kernel support for the /dev file system
- dbus system activation — on-demand launching of dbus-based services
I’m going to carry out the following two tasks in OE:
- Writing fso-boot, a small executable written in C, which mounts the filesystems, brings up DBus and (optionally) launches X11
- Setting fso-boot as new init process, that way you still have sysvinit and udev in your root file system, but they’re not active unless explicitly asked for
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 31, 2010
Most of the things I know about Software and Hardware I have from reading books, looking at sourcecode but most importantly people willing to answer my questions on IRC and giving me a direction I could look for answers.
Now it seems to be my part to give back and help others to gain knowledge, but some things have changed. Free Software has made it to the mainstream, so besides hackers that want to understand things, we do have paid programmers that don't want to understand but still need to make it work.
So the other day I was finding me in a IRC query. His target board was a Freescale i.MX27 ADS and his mission was to make it boot from NAND. He was using the OpenEmbedded "mx27ads" machine and had successfully build a kernel and rootfs. Now the problem is that Freescale is not particulary liked in the Free and Open Source Software Community and that Freescale prefers to be on an isolated island. After about 8 hours of spending my time on this, i decided to get back to paid work and carry on.
If you are searching for support on mailinglists, irc channels and irc queries be prepared to think, giving Free Support means that you will be helped to understand the problem and have to pick a solution yourself. If you don't like that, don't want to think, don't have the time to think, you should consider getting someone from the irc channel as consultant.
So here is a list of things that work when paying a consultant but not when you are paid to do your job and you need someone else to do it for you:
- Pasting your log somewhere and then ask what is wrong with it. In case of compile failures with GNU make you have to search for '***' in the error log, in case of an early failure of a bitbake run it tells you what software to install, in case of configure failures read the config.log, in case of other failures search the log for 'Error', 'rror', 'Failure', 'ailure'. And most importantly think before you post it.
At OpenEmbedded we check for Software being installed on the system. This includes checking for GIT, CVS, SVN and other projects needed to bootstrap. If you don't have it installed OpenEmbedded will tell you "Error... you don't have installed:" and the output will be finished by "You will have to install....". If you paste such an error and ask what the problem is you are really embarassing yourself, your parents, your teachers and your country. The Error message tells you which binaries it searched for and couldn't find, and it points you to common package names for them. I don't think it can be any easier for a Software Engineer.
- Knowing your hardware. Remember, you have the hardware in front of you, you have it connected somewhere, you have something compiled on your system. So if you are asked about the system specification you will have to point to a PDF, website that names the SoC, the used flash chip (NAND, NOR, erase size, name of it), the SDRAM used and whatever else is used on the system. If you paste a FAQ of something like Buildroot you have clearly failed. Know the stuff that is on your desk, if you don't nobody can help you.
- Pasting unrelated information. When you are asked to paste the output of something. Do not just write that oneline by hand. In many cases we humans apply interpretation to things. When you are asking for help it is an indication that you are not able to interpret the result in a way that lead to a result. Paste the full log, it is saving everyone a lot of time.
- Listen/Read to what people tell you. If you have a kernel without NAND support, but want to boot from NAND. You will have to enable NAND and the MXC NAND driver in your kernel. You will have to compile the kernel again, and you will need to boot that kernel. Now we are all humans and have done mistakes before.
One of the most common mistakes is to not change the config, or not to boot the kernel you have built.
For the config, check .config after you have built if it is the one you expected it to be, in case of OpenEmbedded copy the .config back to the defconfig (recipes/linux/${PN}-${PV}/${MACHINE}/defconfig). You should copy it back to have a backup in the case you are rebuilding the kernel or such.
For the second thing it is rather easy. The kernel does contain the TIME it was built and it contains the number of times you have built it from the same directory. So if you rebuild the kernel the TIME and the NUMBER will go up. The kernel does print this information at bootup. If you are asked to check that, don't paste the log, but check it for yourself. Last but not least, if the NUMBER did not go up or the TIME did not change you have either not rebuilt it, or not from the same directory... And if you didn't rebuild from the same directory then you are likely to not use the right config...
- Don't do crazy things while people spend their time to help you. Do not remove your build directories and just start over. No, even after your next rebuild the kernel will lack NAND support. That is because it is not enabled in the defconfig for your machine, and the build process is deterministic... You have someone on the other side that decided he wants to help you, if you are not focused, why should he?
And for all of you, that have read until the end. If you decide to seek help in an open forum. First do your homework by having some idea about the problem, have information ready (hardware spec, build logs, whatever), be prepared to think, formulate a hypothesis and try it.
With Free Software you are in the fortunate situation that you can talk to the guys who build the stuff you are using, all you need to do is to be focused on receiving help and be prepared to think.
January 28, 2010
Since getting back from my month-long holiday a few weeks ago, I've been working on Moblin's next-generation, Clutter-based UI toolkit: MX. You can check this out on moblin git. We're really hoping that we can make this toolkit all you'd need in writing a modern, Clutter-based application for Moblin, so if you're interested, please do check it out and give us some feedback! If you're already acquainted with the Moblin infrastructure, you should know that this obsoletes NBTK.
Today, I 'finished' on one of the new widgets that we'll be providing, MxPathBar. This is very similar to the breadcrumb-bar in the GTK file-chooser, with the added bonus of having an 'editable' mode that allows you to search. We intend to use this in the media library, and perhaps in the file-chooser (more on that at a later date...) Here's a little demonstration - note that this is pre-final stuff and animations/graphics may improve :)
Download video
January 27, 2010
I've been busy day and night, hacking away on my latest pet project in the GSM
field. In fact, it's been a long time since I've been able to dedicate so
much time and energy into one particular project, without many distractions at
all. The project is now finally looking quite promising and making nice
progress throughout the last three weeks.
If progress continues, I hope in another week I'll be able to reveal what this
is all about. I haven't felt this level of excitement since the early days of
Openmoko :)
January 26, 2010
Dooble est un navigateur opensource basé sur webkit et disponible pour un nombre impressionnant de plateformes, dont Openmoko.
Il se veut sécurisé, performant et stable.
La version complète intègre plusieurs fonctionnalités basées sur d'autres projets :
- un moteur de recherche (Yacy)
- un module de messagerie instantanée (Retromessenger)
- un client de messagerie (Nuntius Leo)
Dooble est compatible avec la distribution QtMoko, sur laquelle faudra au préalable installer les dépendances :
# apt-get install libqtcore4 libqtgui4 libqt4-network libqt4-webkit libc6 libgcc1 libstdc++6
Et voilà ce que ça donne :
Pour en savoir plus, rendez-vous sur dooble.sourceforge.net
January 25, 2010
I'll be in San Francisco this Wednesday morning for the Defective By Design anti-DRM protest at Apple's launch event. We'll be out having fun handing out flyers, doing a little theater of our own, and talking to the media and people walking by about the danger DRM poses to the public's freedom and the history of Apple's support for it. We'll be focusing especially on the App Store model used on the iPhone (and possibly used on the tablet to be announced on Wednesday), which prevents users from installing any software from anywhere else.
We're starting at 8:30am (that's not our fault -- Apple is starting at 10am so people will be arriving by 9am I'm sure) outside the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater. A perfect time for stopping by on the way to work :).
Here's the full background info.
If you can come out and support the effort, please let me know at info@defectivebydesign.org.
We'll be meeting up outside the Theater entrance. Stay tuned to http://identi.ca/dbd for updates. Hope to see you there, and bring some friends!
Après avoir traduit l'interface du wikireader en français, nos joyeux passionnés se sont attelés à la tâche de fournir du contenu en français.
Voici le résultat de ce travail acharné : les articles francophones de wikipédia ainsi que ceux du wiktionnaire sont disponibles en téléchargement.
L'évolution peut être suivie "en direct" sur le forum, mais une page wiki dédiée est en cours de rédaction pour synthétiser l'ensemble.
Un immense merci à GeekShadow et Asthro (sans oublier fylefou, misc, burn2, ... et tous les autres qui participent) pour tous ces efforts.
January 20, 2010
Pas mal d'animation en ce moment du côté de Qt.
En effet, Nokia annonce simultanément :
- une version de maintenance de Qt 4.6.1
- une nouvelle version de Qt Creator (1.3.1)
- Qt for maemo 5 passe en version Beta
Tous ces changement confirment la place de Qt au sein de Symbian et Maemo.
Pour en savoir plus, lisez l'annonce officielle.
I've been busy with my daily/paid job, and i have not be able to put any update to this blog.
We start a new year and it's time to post some updates of whats going on from my part ;)
First, i'm moving to Brazil. This give me a lot of headaches, as i need to do a lot of paperwork. I'm almost finishing this issue, as i'm going to travel in 9 days!!
I would like to say thank you to my TuxBrain coleages (we get fun together and we work nicely together); i could not forget IdaSystems (that always believe in my hard work); news projects evolving like Genesi-USA (they finally sent me the EfikaMX board!! :D), Qi-hardware, Harald Welte & other hackers that are giving some GSM freedom :D; all OpenEmbedded hackers, that give me one of the better development tools that i never tested; all SHR & Openmoko comunity (they persist on this device and give us some usable software in that piece of hardware - and maybe a little bit more); and all the FOSS developers/hackers & communities that i'm involved :D (i don't have enough space to put all of them here).
I don't know if i'm going to post anything before i move, but.. this is my first 2010 post & i'm really happy with my future plans.
See you soon (from the south hemisphere) :D
full round of debian updates again, mostly the recent kerberos fixes.
also i restarted the gforge vm which was acting up again.
if you are a GForge-Geek and got some spare time: please come forward!
January 18, 2010
Le prochain "Hackable:1 and Openmoko User Meeting" aura lieu le vendredi 29 janvier, de 19h à 22h à La Cantine (Paris).
Au programme : des présentations, des atelier et des discussions, l'occasion de faire le point sur les dernières avancées de la communauté.
L'entrée est bien sûr libre et ouverte à tous.
Cependant il est recommandé de s'inscrire pour faciliter l'organisation.
Renseignements et inscriptions sur le wiki ou sur le site de La Cantine.
January 17, 2010
Hi Everyone,
there is less than two weeks left for this year’s LinuxTag Call For Papers.
The event takes place in Berlin, Germany during early summer.
The program committee hopes to fill some of the slots in the Mobile & Embedded
track with Maemo related talks. So feel free to submit a talk!
http://www.linuxtag.org/2010/en/program/call-for-papers.html
January 16, 2010
J'ai eu la chance de pouvoir assister à la conférence de Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS pour les intimes) le jeudi 14 janvier.
En effet, le "père" des Logiciels Libres était en tournée Française : le 12 à paris, le 13 à Lyon, le 14 à Grenoble et le 15 à Autrans.
Cet événement était organisé par l'Ecole de Management de Grenoble on peut d'ailleurs trouver le "teaser" sur dailymotion.
Le thème était "Ethique & Logiciels Libres", un vaste sujet que Stallman maîtrise bien.
Comme vous pouvez le constater l'auditorium de 500 places était plein comme un oeuf.
La conférence était également retransmise en direct dans une autre salle contenant encore plus d'une centaine de personnes.
Le moins qu'on puisse dire, c'est que le personnage ne laisse pas indifférent !
Mais son discours est d'une limpidité exemplaire, même (surtout) pour les non-initiés - et en français s'il vous plaît.
Il a ainsi détaillé l'intérêt des Logiciels Libres dans de nombreux secteurs (entreprises, education, ...).
Les aspects éthiques mais aussi économiques ont été abordés avec beaucoup de sincérité et d'humour.
Et bien sûr, il a fréquemment démontré les dangers des logiciels privateurs.
Pour en savoir plus sur les opinions de ce personnage assez controversé, je vous invite à lire le compte-rendu et surtout à écouter les vidéos de son intervention du 12 janvier à Paris sur Framatube ou Dailymotion.
Même si le thème de cette soirée était la présentation de sa biographie, le discours était forcément très proche de celui que nous avons entendu.
EDIT : la vidéo complète au format ogg/theora peut être téléchargée ici et une transcription est disponible sur le Framablog.
D'ailleurs, nous avons eu droit au même sketch de Saint iGNUcius de l'église de emacs à la fin.
En bon showman, il salue un public conquis avant de passer aux questions.
J'ai toutefois publié un extrait vidéo des questions posées à la fin de la conférence de Grenoble :
P.S. : En réalité, j'ai filmé toute l'intervention avec mon appareil photo même si ce n'était pas ce que j'avais prévu.
Malheureusement pour pouvoir tout prendre, j'ai du choisir la qualité la plus basse.
Le résultat est donc bien moins bon que les vidéos du Groupe Eyrolles déjà en ligne, aussi je n'en publierais pas plus.
January 08, 2010
Many people have pointed out the MagicJack Femtocell product that has been announced at CES. I cannot really understand the big hype and news about it. Why? read further...
On the technical side, there is hardly anything new. Using projects like
OpenBTS or OpenBSC, you can run your own GSM network and connect it to VoIP.
Sure, the retail price of the MagicJack is much lower, but that's the economics
of scale. As soon as OpenBSC support for one of the recent femtocells is done,
we also have a much lower cost solution to the same problem.
On the legal and business side, I can see many problems for MagicJack:
- To operate equipment in the GSM or 3G spectrum, you need a license. Since
a nationwide GSM operator license is very expensive in about any country of the
world, it is economically not an option. Selling the MagicJack devices without
a license and leaving the spectrum license to the user will not work, or at least
not long, since regulatory authorities and commercial operators are not going to
let anyone deploy systems that interfere with their networks.
-
If you keep the Operator's SIM in the phone, and use that SIM on your own
network you might at least violate the terms of services of the operator. The
SIM card normally belongs to the operator, and it is part of the users business
relationship with that operator. As such, you can not really use it with other
networks. Sure, if you do this at home with your OpenBTS/OpenBSC installation,
nobody will care. But if somebody is doing this commercially, and in a way
that affects the sale of talk time of the regular operators, again it will not
take long until the commercial operator will sue you.
-
Security. If you run your phone with a "foreign" SIM, you do not know the Ki
on the SIM and thus cannot do cryptographic authentication and/or encryption.
This is a big security issue. It is once again not an issue in your personal
testbed setup, but it is going to be one if you do this at large scale as a
mass market product.
So, as you can see: It's neither technically something exceptionally new,
nor is it something that has a very promising business or legal outlook. The
only way how a product like this would work is if it is authorized by the
respective operator. But why would the operator authorize something that will
take talk time away from his network and thus his revenue stream?
January 07, 2010
I've finally found enough spare time to work on detailed plans for a GSM
development board. The idea here is to have a 100% open hardware design
with 100% free software that provides an inexpensive platform for GSM
related R&D.
Initially the focus is on having a board that can behave like a GSM cellphone,
next steps would be to have a multi-channel frequency-hopping receiver, and
finally the option of using it as a BTS.
The idea is fairly simple: Take a commercial off-the-shelf analog baseband and
RF circuit for GSM and attach it to a general purpose DSP, add some glue logic
and go ahead. But the devil is in the details:
- You want something where you can still find the parts on the market, but
which still has sufficient leaked documentation that you can write an open
source driver for it.
- The requirements for a MS and a BTS are quite different. A phone never
needs to continuously receive and transmit in all timeslots, e.g.
- The requirement for a multi-channel frequency-hopping receiver is mainly a
high number of receiver circuits, so the solution needs to scale to a larger
number of receivers.
- The analog baseband circuits often have quite obscure control interfaces
which need to be driven. Custom peripherals in programmable logic (CPLD/FPGA)
are required.
- The TDMA nature has strict timing requirements. Normal processors and
software-based mechanisms are not sufficient to trigger the required events
and their sequencing at a high enough precision.
Anyway, there is sort of a first plan now, and the next weeks and months will
be spent with refining the plans and building a first proof-of-concept
prototype. Once that has proven to work, we want to go ahead with finishing
the design for a real board, to be manufactured in sufficient quantities for
interested parties.
Unless you have worked in GSM phone or base station hardware design or have a
similar level of EE and DSP skills, please refrain from contacting me right
now about how to join the project. We want to focus on getting things going
first, then make a public release at a point where there is something that
works sufficiently well that we can support a larger community of developers.
January 05, 2010
Bearstech annonce une baisse de prix sur les produits Openmoko.
Voici un résumé des offres :
- Neo Freerunner A7 + debug board + accessoires : 210€ (ou 2 pour 420€)
- Debug board seule : 50€
Comptez 15€ de plus pour les frais de port.
Rectification : le prix est finalement de 220€ et pas 210€. Mais on me laisse entendre qu'il y aurait en prime une carte micro-SD pré-flashée avec Hackable:1.
