Planet OpenMoko

Chris Lord: FOSS rules

Wed, 14 May 2008 20:43:00 +0000

I decided to buy an ebook reader recently as there's a lot of manga I want to catch up on and after borrowing mallum's Sony Librie for a while, I've found that it's a great format for reading comics. Brilliant to de-stress while things are compiling. Anyway, Linux tools for such devices seem to be woefully lacking, so I figured it couldn't be that hard to write my own (for my own particular needs) - and thanks to FOSS, it really wasn't :)

Thanks to The GIMP's scripting engine, I have a script that can transform images into the required format; thanks to bash, I have a shell script that can get all the images to the script; and thanks to cairo, it was incredibly easy to write an app that turns a load of PNGs into a PDF. Source for all can be found here - handy if you have a Sony Reader/Librie or an Irex Iliad or something along those lines. Probably less useful for Kindle users..?

Jollen: Richard Stallman 台灣行第一天

Mon, 12 May 2008 15:09:36 +0000

自由軟體基金會創辦人 Richard Stallman 今天下午抵達台灣。這次 Richard Stallman 來台，有一位美麗的小姐 Dora 隨行。到機場接機時，一眼就認出站在路邊等候的大師。大鬍子是大師的特色，非常地容易辨認。

一行人先將 Richard 接到 Openmoko apartment，沒錯！這是「Openmoko 公寓」，是專門「招待」外國工程師的「行館」，Openmoko 公寓非常靠近 Taipei 101。來的路上，Richard 在高速公路上看到 Taipei 101 時，發出了讚嘆的聲音。Richard 的女友 Dora 小姐，對於 101 的外觀則是感到興趣，她覺得 101 大樓長的真是奇怪呢！

大師是一位非常依賴電子郵件的人，他所有的工作幾乎都是透過電子郵件完成的。在 Richard 來台前，我們也都是完全依靠電子郵件和 Richard 討論行程，以及確認每一個細節。在電子郵件往來過程發現，大師就是大師，對每一個細節都很注重以及重視，這可不是台灣人講的「龜毛」，而是對於工作的認真態度，以及對理念的執著。Richard 在「自由軟體運動」的道路上，一路走來，始終如一。

Richard Stallman 對於自由軟體運動理念相當執著，因此可能有人會認為他是一個不好相處的人，但是今天和大師相處一天下來，我覺得，大師並沒有大師的感覺。不要誤會我的意思了，我指的是，Richard 是一個沒有大師架子的「老爹」，也就沒有那種難以接近，或是言語交談時的壓迫感。除了有些地方，大師有他的「堅持」外，其他事情都很容易和他溝通。但其實，Richard 所堅持的，也只是在表達他的想法，希望能讓我們都能聽聽他的觀念。能親自聽到大師述說他的觀念，這真是一個難得的經驗。

大家可能也都聽過，Richard Stallman 是相當喜歡蝴蝶的。下午我們陪 Richard Stallman 回到 Openmoko 公寓時，大廳裡恰巧有一隻蝴蝶，不斷地衝撞著落地窗。Richard 看到了，他走向前去等到蝴蝶停止，然後很仔細很細心地，捏住蝴蝶的翅膀，將牠放到大門外的樹上。

我說 Richard Stallman 其實是一個「可愛」的老爹。晚上 Openmoko 大批人馬，來到內湖的伍角船板，和大師共進晚餐。Richard 一開始有點嚴肅，我想應該是跟大家都還不熟的關係，不過接下來跟大家可就有說有笑的了，甚致還會開些小玩笑！晚餐時，當然免不了要向大師請益「自由軟體」的一些問題，有同事問到「patent」的議題，Richard 也很願意向大家說明。

第一次見到「傳說中」的自由軟體之父，內心有一點點感動，也有敬佩。因為 Openmoko 公寓是電梯大廈，電梯有保全，需要門禁卡才能操作，沒想到大師說「住戶有進出電梯的『自由』，我了解這是為了安全需要，但讓大家失去了這個自由。」

晚餐後，大師向大家說「謝謝」，離去前，也向大家道別「happy hacking」，很有禮貌。Richard 在回 Openmoko 公寓的路上「再次」問了我「do you like the music?」，老爹分享他帶來的音樂給我們，今天一整天都聽著老爹帶來的音樂。我估計他問了我音樂好不好聽至少有 5 次吧！但說真的，我還蠻喜歡 Richard 帶來的音樂。這音樂非常有民俗風，是傳統音樂，聽起來非常舒服。我計畫向老爹要他的 CD 當紀念品，希望我能成功！

Richard Stallman 將在 5 月 14 日和 5 月 15 日發表公開演說，想要一睹大師風采的朋友，趕快來看這裡：[http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman/zh_tw]。

延伸閱讀

2008.05.03: 自由軟體基金會創辦人 Richard Stallman 來台演講

Guillaume Chereau: First day at OpenMoko

noreply@blogger.com (Guillaume Chéreau) — Mon, 12 May 2008 09:54:00 +0000

Today is my first working day at OpenMoko.

After I met my new coworkers - I will need some time to get used to all the new faces - I started to play with the Neo FreeRunner. So I followed the wiki instructions to flash my cell phone with the last kernel and file system image. It worked fine :-)

Of course, since I am a fan of python and gtk, the second thing I tried was to run a python / gtk / glade application. And the proof that it works with no problem :

Here is a screenshot of glade designer running on my laptop :
And here is the same interface running on the Neo FreeRunner, from a python script :

This is pretty cool. The only problem is that the menu bar looks a little bit too small for a screen touch interface.

Stefan Schmidt: OpenMoko Framework Initiative goes live

Thu, 08 May 2008 22:40:32 +0000

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.

Michael "mickeyl" Lauer: Openmoko Framework Initiative

Mon, 05 May 2008 16:02:47 +0000

I have not been posting about my work for Openmoko for quite a while. There are multiple reasons for that, ask me privately if you want to know… Today though, I want to post about a high-priority project inside Openmoko, Inc. — the new framework and middleware initiative which me and some guys will be working on.

I have been talking privatly about this to people on conferences, but now it’s going to be an official project. It’s something we attempted to do when we started back in 2006, but for some reason, we did it the wrong way. We tried taking existing components to make them fulfill our usecases and to fit our needs, which in some cases turned out to be impossible. This time we’re moving the other way round. We will take our usecases as the goal and create the necessary infrastructure to make it happen. If — while we’re on the way — can integrate existing efforts, even better. If not, we will eventually see how to merge with existing efforts. The goal is to get things done — now!.

Basically all this is about two components, which are independent, but closely related.

The framework.
A bread-and-butter application.

The Framework

The purpose here is:

Give people the infrastructure to create solid and exciting software products based on the Openmoko platform,
Support competing UIs while collaborating on developing services, and
Encourage framework users (e.g. application developers) to also contribute to the framework.

With this in mind, we define the following requirements:

Make it simple,
Concentrate on core services,
Be programming language agnostic,
Be UI toolkit agnostic, and
Try to reuse existing technologies as much as possible, but not at the cost of a bad API.

Our way to achieve this on a technical level is through dbus:

Chose dbus as the collaboration line. Below dbus, we can work together. Above dbus, we can differentiate.
Expose features through dbus APIs implemented by UI-agnostic and language-agnostic services (daemons).
Optimize for Openmoko devices, but support multiple architectures (OpenEZX, Xanadu, …) and purposes through plugin interfaces and suitable hardware abstraction mechanisms.
Be not afraid of reinventing the wheel for a wheel-barrow if all the existing wheels are made for sports cars.

The framework is not going to cover everything but the kitchen sink though, especially it’s not about:

Bootloader, Kernel, or System Init.
X-Window-System, Window Manager, UI Toolkits,
Application Launchers, Applications, or Fancy UIs.

The Bread-and-Butter application

The framework initiative is related to developing an application that uses the framework to turn a Linux-phone into a usable feature phone. The main goals for this application are:

Make it simple,
Concentrate on core features,
Have a beautiful, efficient and consistent UI,
Be easily extensible through scripting, and
Show the power of the framework.

This application is developed in tandem with the framework, because when you write framework APIs, it’s important to have existing API consumers. Without API consumers, APIs are just specs, could be awkyard, or plainly unusable — that’s why this bread-and-butter application is of central importance to the framework project.

I’m looking forward to spend a lot of time on this project and I invite all of you to participate. Most of the discussions will happen on the Openmoko developers mailing list and the FreeSmartPhone standards list We already have achieved some important basics thanks to great contributions by the moko underground people that are grouped around the neo1973-germany.de site and the IRC channel #neo1973-germany. I’m also looking forward to great results from this years’ Openmoko Google Summer of Code.
As for the current status, we will update the wiki page OpenmokoFramework frequently and sent status updates once and then to the mailing lists.

Good speed!

Jollen: 自由軟體基金會創辦人 Richard Stallman 來台演講

Sat, 03 May 2008 03:55:48 +0000

學生時代就相當敬佩的自由軟體精神領袖 Richard Stallman 要來台灣了。Richard Stallman 在就讀哈佛大學時，於麻省理工人工智能實驗室發展 Emacs 軟體，也就是在這個時期，他體驗到駭客文化的可貴與精神，從此成為悍衛自由軟體的鬥士。Sam Williams 也寫了一本「自由軟體的聖戰」[1]，內容在描述 Richard Stallman 的自由軟體運動。

以下引述 Openmoko 的新聞稿：

自由軟體基金會創辦人、同時也是知名軟體 GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 與 GNU Debugger (GDB) 的原始作者與開發者 Richard Stallman 將於 5 月 12 日來台並發表演說。Richard 於 1984 年發動 GNU operating system 發展計畫，並在 1985 年成立 Free Software Foundation（自由軟體基金會），接著在 1989 年寫出第一個 GPL （GNU General Public License）條款。GPL 至今已是最重要的自由軟體授權條款，至今有超過 60% 的自由軟體都是採取 GPL 授權規範。因應商業化需要，GPLv3 在經過長時間的討論後，也於 2007 年 6 月正式釋出，並受到產業界高度重視與討論。

睽違三年，Richard Stallman 再度來台，將在台北與新竹各發表一場公開演說。Richard 提到「希望能讓大家了解 GNU operating system，以及自由軟體（free software）的真正意義。」除了發表與自由軟體相關之演說外，Richard Stallman 也會和現場聽眾進行公開討論，這是一個向 Richard 當面請益的好機會。

Richard 本次來台預計將發表與「自由軟體運動」以及「軟體專利威脅」有關之演說。所有活動都是免費參加，Richard 同時也非常想聽到來自各界對自由軟體的聲音。詳細活動資訊請參閱 Openmoko Wiki 活動頁面。

* 活動頁面：http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman/zh_tw

延伸閱讀

2008.04.30: 嵌入式系統廠商不能不懂的自由軟體授權 GPLv3

[1] Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software, http://www.faifzilla.org/

Chris Lord: Good news everybody!

Thu, 01 May 2008 08:11:00 +0000

It's now ok to read the SWF spec and create an independent SWF decoder? I don't know if there are any catches here, but taking this at face value, that's great, right?

Sean Moss-Pultz: Smile.

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:30:04 +0000

I must never forget to pay attention to the small things…

...nature is always smiling.

Michael "mickeyl" Lauer: Bossa Conference Video

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:24:14 +0000

The guys from INdT posted the Bossa Conference promotional video for next year’s installment:

Yours truly can be found a couple of times… so — how many appearances do I have in this video?

Andrzej "balrog-kun" Zaborowski: Unscientific GPS note

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 02:32:03 +0000

Last week I charged the different batteries and took a GTA01 Neo, a GTA02 Neo and a Nokia N810 with me to enable their GPSes on my way home from school. Then I saved the traces they logged and loaded into JOSM to have a look (GTA01, GTA02, N810 - gpx files converted using gpsbabel from nmea)

The devices made respectively 11.28km, 12.12km and 11.07km routes (sitting in the same bag the whole time).

All in all I like the GTA01 accuracy the most although all three sometimes have horrible errors. They all three have accuracy about near the bottom line of usability for OSM mapping for a city, so if you get a GPS with that in mind, it may be slightly disappointing. All three are quite good at keeping the fix while indoor but everytime there’s not enough real input available they will invent their own rather than admit (if you had physics experiments at high-school and had to prove theories that way, you know how this works), resulting in run-offs to alternative realities - especially the N810 likes to make virtual trips. They all three apparently do advanced extrapolation and most of the time get things right, but the GTA01 GPS (the hammerhead) very notably assumes in all the calculations that the vehicle in which you move has a certain inertia and treats tight turns as errors. I’m on a bike most of the time and can turn very quickly and it feels as if the firmware was made for a car (SpeedEvil thinks rather a supertanker).

It’s suprising how well they all three can determine the direction in which they’re pointing even when not moving (the GTAs more so). The firmwares seem to rely on that more than on the actual position data sometimes. This results in a funny effect that the errors they make are very consistent even if very big - once the GPS thinks it’s on the other side of a river from you (or worse in the middle), it will stay there as long as you keep going along the river.

I’m curious to see what improvement the galileo system brings over GPS.

UPDATE: I was curious about the precision with which the altitude is reported, which can’t be seen in JOSM. First I found that the $GPGGA sentences on my GTA01 have always 000.0 in the elevation field, but the field before it (normally containing HDOP) has a value that kind of makes sense as an altitude, so I swapped the two fields (HDOP value should be < 20.0 I believe?). Then I loaded the data into gnuplot to generate this chart:

The horizontal axis has longitude and vertical the elevation in metres above mean sea level. Err, sure? I might have screwed something up but I checked everything twice. Except the GTA01 which might be a different value completely - but the is some correlation. I’m not sure which one to trust now.

Andy "ScaredyCat" Powell: The theme of the day…

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:25:37 +0000

So, a couple more changes and updates to my images. First of all I’ve taken out the Oh-puzzles because they don’t work due to this bug - once that’s sorted they’ll go back in. There’s a new little script too which allows you to switch themes. I’ve removed some of the themes that are installed by default essentially because the panel in the top right dies and never returns if you try to use them. So at the moment you get to pick between Moko, ScaredyCat and the original Openmoko theme, openmoko-standard-2. By default the ScaredyCat theme is active. So, no excuses now. Get designing some killer themes.

The next change is due to a request from Taki asking for tangogps to be preconfigured to use the sd card for map and track storage. So now, by default, maps on my builds are stored in:

/media/card/tangogps/Maps/OSM/

and track logs are stored in

/media/card/tangogps/logs/

This should be a little more useful and wont fill up your flash with tiles.

Jollen: Qt 4.4 在 Neo1973 與 HTC Touch Cruise 上展示 iPhone-Like 介面

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:00:31 +0000

前一篇日記「iPhone 改變工程師設計嵌入式裝置的思惟」提到 iPhone 在 UI 方面的卓越表現。稍早前，[Trolltech Labs] 發表一項新的實驗項目：新的 Qt 4.4 已經可以在 Windows Mobile 以及 Embedded Linux 二個平臺上執行了。

(圖片來源：http://dist.trolltech.com/video/wince/qtembedded44video.html)

Trolltech Labs 提供一段 demo 影片，Windows Mobile 平臺使用 HTC Touch Cruise 手機，Embedded Linux 平臺則是使用 Openmoko 的 Neo1973 手機。不過，最引人注目的不是「Qt Everywhere」的表現。新的 Qt 在 UI 方面最令人驚豔的是它的「iPhone like graphics」。

我們都知道，未來的智慧型手機開發方法論，會是以使用者為導向的一個體系，包含如何讓應用程式之間更緊密地結合（coherent）以及如何提昇使用性（usability），因此 UI 將會是決定這個部份的關鍵。Nokia 在收購 Trolltech 公司後，在 UI 這一段看來已經有一些不錯的成果了。

Guillaume Chereau: New job at openmoko

noreply@blogger.com (Guillaume Chéreau) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 07:16:00 +0000

In a few weeks I will start to work with the great people of the OpenMoko project.

The goal of this project is to produce a totally open source mobile phone that everyone can modify at will.

You can learn more from the web site, download the sources, and even the CAO files !

My job will start in a few weeks, for the moment I am still working for Taiwan university, but I start to have a look at the huge mailing list archives of OpenMoko to get a better idea of the project and the people involved.

I'll post more on the subject when I will actually start working. I guess this will be a great experience for me, and I will do my best to contribute to the project.

Guillaume Chereau: Welcome to my new blog

noreply@blogger.com (Guillaume Chéreau) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 07:02:00 +0000

Welcome to Charlie137 (aka Guillaume Chereau) new blog.
I start this new blog in addition to my other blog.

This blog will be more tech oriented. I will talk about the things I like in computer science, and also about my new job for OpenMoko.
So get ready to hear a lot about linux, OpenMoko, Python, D, Vala, Stellarium (among other things.)

I'll keep updating my old blog with drawings and video games stuffs when I'll get the time. I have been pretty busy (and sick) recently so I didn't take time to post anything.

Enjoy,
-gui

Andy "ScaredyCat" Powell: Just a little easier…

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:36:30 +0000

I’ve made quite a few changes and a couple of additions to my images of late. You may have noticed the new boot logo, the new startup sound and the new theme now there are a couple more goodies. First of all the two new applications, well one application and one script. The Bluetooth Keyboard application (really the script) is a simple shell script that hunts for bluetooth keyboards and connects to the first one it finds. If bluetooth is off it turns it on. If I can get zenity to compile properly this will be a much better script. The next item is the Twitter client, GtkTwitter, It’s very basic but it works pretty well. I had to make a couple of modifications to the icons so you could actually poke them with your fingers.

Next up we have a little script that starts on boot, checks to see if you have the gllin ipk ( gllin_1.0+r350-r0_fic-gta01.ipk ) in the root of your sd card. If it’s there it will automatically get installed for you - Very useful post-flash. The script will also replace the standard gllin script with the one from the tangogps site. Why? Well, because tangogps and gpsd are in the image too! Shortly, I’m hoping to provide a pre-downloaded series of tiles for download too. The good news is now you can have gps and a gps application ready for you immediately. Oh one last thing. If you create a directory on your sd card called local you can create bin and/or sbin directories and have applications run straight from there - all those little utils you need to install again after each flash now have a permanent home.

All of these are part of the image, you do not need to install anything extra, unless you want to

Update: The bluetooth keyboard script is much more wizzy now that I’ve added Zenity to the image and use that so you can now pick the keyboard you want to connect to from the list of devices. I’ve also added some notify calls so that you can see what is going on during the script.

Andrzej "balrog-kun" Zaborowski: Trip

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 02:06:23 +0000

So I went to Brazil last month but had no time to put any pictures online, now I uploaded them here. Also uploaded some pictures from a trip to Spain that was just before that.

Brazil cities reminded me a lot of Peru, which was the only place I had seen in America (this comparison must seem awfully ignorant to anyone who lives in some place between Brazil and Peru). We spent one week in Ceará region seeking out best places for paragliding. One of the spots was the launch pad near Nossa Senhora Imaculada sanctuary near Quixada where “Sol” group (Brazil) took off last year and set the current world record in straight distance paraglider flight landing over 460km away. (Obviously this was a different season and incomparable weather conditions.) I made an attempt to adapt my Neo1973 Linux phone to dub as a variometer using the altitude data from built-in GPS. Impressively the measures are somewhere on the edge of being accurate enough for that purpose, but time resolution is way too low (normal variometers use air pressure changes rather than GPS). The speaker is loud enough to emit the familiar beeping of a variometer (so good enough for showing off even if inaccurate). The GTA02 should be much better with its 3D accelerometers, but I didn’t have time to play with it yet.

The second week the group split and I went Bossa ‘08 conference that was in a fantastic setting and from where I brought home a collection of five geeky t-shirts.

Stefan Schmidt: Leaving Openmoko aka Free Your Self

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:11:17 +0000

It's over 13 months now since I started to work for OpenMoko. Wednesday was my last day.

I'm not leaving with bad feelings. Still over the last months I disagreed with decisions and directions, got frustrated with the work I had to do. Not the best conditions for a productive work environment.

However I still like to see OpenMoko success. As open as possible mobile phone hardware on which I can flash all kind of software I like. Not fighting against vendor policies but having almost all options I like. Still sounds great to me.

Over the last 13 months I learned a lot. For both, coding and business. Working with some great people from the FOSS community from all over the world and with great taiwanese engineers. (Watch out for these guys, they are awesome but shy) Made new friends and had to deal with an interesting different culture.

It was an awesome but exhausting trip. It's over for now.

I plan to do no paid work for the next 1-2 months, perhaps even longer. In this time-frame I need to come back to the study life I had before and take some rest. Read some good books, hang out with friends and don't worry about deadlines.

After that we will see what kind of work will come in. At least it must be not as much time consuming as OpenMoko was. Need to focus on my studies.

Thomas Wood: OpenMoko Wifi Driver

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:20:33 +0000

I totally missed this until now, but my colleague, Samuel Ortiz, wrote up some information about implementing the Wifi driver for OpenMoko:

http://labs.o-hand.com/2008/02/05/openmoko-wifi-driver/

I’m pleased to say that during my own testing I had no problems and it even works with WPA encryption. Good job Samuel!

Sebastian Manckes Blog: freedroidz @linuxtag

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:08:15 +0000

As in the last year, some people in our company have just started to play around with their Neo’s and Nokia Internet Tablets to get some cool robots for Linuxtag running. In the last year, we had a booth with N800-controlled robots as showcase for Jalimo, our Java platform.

Beyond the platform showcase, people got so much fun with their robot ideas, that they have started the freedroidz project, just to play around with this nice toys. So, feel free to play with us, either now, or at Linuxtag - only six weeks left!

Thomas Wood: OpenMoko FreeRunner LEDs, etc.

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:32:51 +0000

Before I took my FreeRunner prototype along to Ole’s OpenMoko talk in London yesterday, I hacked up a little demo application in python/pygtk to display various new features in the FreeRunner (Wifi, accellerometers, LEDs). If you where there yesterday, you probably saw this live in action:

On my previous post OpenMoko post, someone asked about the LEDs on the FreeRunner. Obviously, you can’t see any proof of the LEDs in screenshots, so I took some very quick photographs:

Thomas Wood: History Meme

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:02:52 +0000

Desktop:
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head 91 cd 75 ls 49 svn 45 ssh 37 vim 37 make 13 ./test-notes 11 svn-prepare-ChangeLog.pl 11 ./openmoko-messages 11 ./openmoko-dialer
Laptop:
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head 91 vim 53 sh 52 svn 47 cd 40 ls 31 find 21 git 18 ssh 11 su 11 make

Andrzej "balrog-kun" Zaborowski: ZoomMDK external view

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 22:51:16 +0000

Texas Instruments OMAP series of mobile CPUs have for some time had okay Linux support with parts of the code coming from community, parts from TI and parts from Nokia, one of the vendors. This month we start seeing results of TI’s recent efforts on making this support better by opening various technical resources that were available only to the vendors earlier. Yesterday the announcement of their DSP-bridge framework release under GPL was posted to the linux-omap list, and as of this week you can download the entire TRMs (35MB PDF each) for various OMAP3 CPUs from ti.com. Added to this are various types of manuals, example code and that covers also the recently announced 35xx models.

I had an occasion to be at TI’s Rishi Bhattacharya’s talk at BossaConference last month with a sneak peek on the process of opening OMAP3 related resources that had been ongoing internally for some time. Apparently more releases are planned including among other things some GPLed sources (and some freeware binaries) of DSP codecs for use on OMAP. This also should make life a fair bit easier. One of the interesting points was also the evaluation board for the new processors which looks a bit more like a final product than previously made evaluation boards. It’s called Zoom MDK and it’s sold by a third party. It includes a modem, optional battery and a neat case so it can potentially be used as a (only slightly oversize for today’s standards) phone, and comes equipped with a full Linux SDK. One of the points is also to make it more affordable so that individual developers are not excluded (currently only available through a beta programme but the final price was said to be aiming at below $900). There’s an effort to have Openmoko running on the thing. Looking forward to that and to the rest of the releases from TI.

Koen Kooi: Community interaction

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:57:04 +0000

Benjamin Otte shares my observations about forum users and reporting problems:

"It almost never occurs to the forum members to file bugs, check the homepage of upstream projects or otherwise interact with the distribution. Instead, they spend most of the time with anecdotal stories of how they fixed problems and hearsay about what they think happens in the Linux world. In short, they’re as well informed about their distro as the tabloid press is."

I have given up on trying to get people to file bugs at the right bugtracker and have adopted the rather cynical filosophy of "If you don't care enough to file a bug, I don't care enough to look into your supposed problem".